How can I get to read a large file and not break it up into bits

Question

Hi,
How do I read a large file and not get the file cut into bits so each has its own beginning and ending.
like
1.aaa
2.aaa
3.aaa
4....
10.bbb
11.bbb
12.bbb
13.bbb
if the file was read on the line 11 and I wanted to read at 3 and then read again at 10.
how do I specify the byte in the file of the large file since the read function has a read(byteb[],index,bytes to read);
And it will only index in the array of bytes itself.
Thanks
San Htat

Answer 1

tjacobs01 wrote:
Peter__Lawrey wrote:
Try RandomAccessFile. Not only do I hate RandomAccessFiles because of their inefficiency and limited use in today's computing world, The one dominated by small devices with SSD? Or the one dominated by large database servers and b-trees?
I would also like to hate on the name 'RandomAccessFile' almost always, there's nothing 'random' about the access. I tend to think of the tens of thousands of databases users were found to have created in local drives in one previous employer's audit. Where's the company's mission-critical software? It's in some random Access file.
Couldn't someone have come up with a better name, like NonlinearAccessFile? I guess the same goes for RAM to...Non-linear would imply access times other than O(N), but typically not constant, whereas RAM is nominally O(1), except it is highly optimised for consecutive access, as are spinning disk files, except RAM is fast in either direction.
[one of these things is not like the other|http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/20/2008-Disk-Performance#p-11] silicon disks are much better at random access than rust disks and [Machine architecture|http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4714369049736584770] at about 1:40 - RAM is much worse at random access than sequential.