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Name

fflush - flush a stream

Synopsis

#include <stdio.h>

int fflush(FILE *stream);

Description

For output streams, fflush() forces a write of all user-space buffered data for the given output or update stream via the stream’s underlying write function. For input streams, fflush() discards any buffered data that has been fetched from the underlying file, but has not been consumed by the application. The open status of the stream is unaffected.

If the stream argument is NULL, fflush() flushes all open output streams.

For a nonlocking counterpart, see unlocked_stdio(3) .

Return Value

Upon successful completion 0 is returned. Otherwise, EOF is returned and errno is set to indicate the error.

Errors

EBADF
Stream is not an open stream, or is not open for writing.

The function fflush() may also fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for write(2) .

Attributes

Multithreading (see pthreads(7) )

The fflush() function is thread-safe.

Conforming to

C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008.

The standards do not specify the behavior for input streams. Most other implementations behave the same as Linux.

Notes

Note that fflush() only flushes the user-space buffers provided by the C library. To ensure that the data is physically stored on disk the kernel buffers must be flushed too, for example, with sync(2) or fsync(2) .

See Also

fsync(2) , sync(2) , write(2) , fclose(3) , fopen(3) , setbuf(3) , unlocked_stdio(3)

Colophon

This page is part of release 3.78 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

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