vb.net - peek or read
Hello,
how can I know the last HEX byte of a 2GB binary file without opening the whole file..
is there a easy way for doing this without running into memory problems?
how can I know the last HEX byte of a 2GB binary file without opening the whole file..
is there a easy way for doing this without running into memory problems?
AndyAinscow
As far as I know you will have to open the complete file and move (read) to the end - which you could do in smaller chuncks eg with a 1MB buffer you read the file into in a loop until you get the final section.
ASKER
is there a faster way to just read the last bytes?
I can think of a couple.
Use a different language (eg C++) where you can access the file via pointer so you can rapidly move to the end by incrementing the pointer without having to read to a buffer.
Work out which disc sector the last segment of the file occupies then read the disc sector directly. (The OP system might not let you do this.)
ASKER
so there is not really any other way huh?
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Nice one - I'd been looking into the wrong classes and not found a way to set the position in the stream. (Sometimes the documentation seems to be there to make things as difficult as possible to find).
@AndyAinscow, it can be troubling to navigate those pages, yes, especially when you're not certain where to look. I remembered there had to be a Seek but apart from having to find the exact class it is in, I also wondered if that would do exactly what you described: read through the whole file, which would make it rather useless of course. So after I found the right doc page, I decided to double check and test with a few fairly big files on a USB stick and the speed of that convinced me it was indeed jumping directly to the end, as it would do in C/C++.
@XK8ER, thanks for the grade!
PS: Now, looking back at my own test code, I found you can also simply replace Seek() with:
@XK8ER, thanks for the grade!
PS: Now, looking back at my own test code, I found you can also simply replace Seek() with:
fs.Position = fs.Length - 1;