See pack and unpack for record handling; sysopen, sysseek, sysread, syswrite for retrieving or writing records; and flock for keeping the files from being modified during writes. As mentioned above, post contents should be in a separate file, with the post record containing just start and end offsets. This keeps your records neat and fixed-length. If your users are allowed to do edits, you should allocate a few extra characters for post content so small increases don't require moving it to a new spot in the file. After the time limit for edits is reached, your clean-up utility can rewrite the content to exact size.

It would, however, be simpler to just do this with mySQL. Certain things like indexes can get quite complicated to program.

In reply to Re: After a good example of efficient record handling... by TedPride
in thread After a good example of efficient record handling... by NeilF

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