On Monday 18 March 2002 4:51 am, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
> Hi !
>
> I came across this line : " the main advantage of UNIX/Linux systems is
> that the I/O is stream oriented as opposed to record oriented for other OS
> " - what does stream oriented I/O mean ? And why is it advantageous ?
> Could someone please explain or at least point to the relevant links ?

Which means that the disk (and files on the disk) is considered as a stream 
of bytes. Some older OSes considered files as a collection of records. So,
each file had concepts like field separator, record separator etc. 
attached to it.

If an OS implements stream oriented I/O, then file formats are for the
applications to decide. So, you can have a PDF file created on one OS and
read it in another. With record oriented I/O, file formats are decided by
the OS. A PDF created on one OS might not be openable on another OS.

Binand

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