C file input/output

The C programming language provides many standard library functions for file input and output.

[1] The functionality descends from a "portable I/O package" written by Mike Lesk at Bell Labs in the early 1970s,[2] and officially became part of the Unix operating system in Version 7.

The stream model of file I/O was popularized by Unix, which was developed concurrently with the C programming language itself.

This library uses what are called streams to operate with physical devices such as keyboards, printers, terminals or with any other type of files supported by the system.

This library, introduced in 1991, aimed to avoid inconsistencies, unsafe practices and inefficiencies in the design of stdio.