Chapter 3 What Are Files?

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Programs take, send, record, and retrieve information. From the perspective of the computer, files are the only source and the only destination for all of the information that the programs manage for you.

If you have kept records of any kind for any purpose, you have worked with files. Keeping related pieces of information together, in one place, is a loose but workable definition of a file.

Computers, however, go beyond this loose definition of a file. For the computer, a file is the following:

a collection of related pieces of information kept in a consistent form.
a source from which information is retrieved (a computer "reads" a file).
a destination to which information is sent (a computer "writes" to a file).

Chapter 3 What Are Files?

Technical documentation

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