Introduction

This library provides tools for reading, writing and manipulating bdio files (bdio.pdf). These are binary files, structured into records, which contain a thin layer of meta-data each. This meta-data allows to keep the files machine independent and browsable, while maintaining the advantages of raw binary I/O, i.e. minimal file-size and decent speed.

Dependencies

The library should compile on standard UNIX systems with standard C99 compilers.
It depends on the standard C library, in particular

stdio.h
stdint.h (C99)
stdlib.h
string.h
time.h
errno.h

Furthermore the C POSIX library is needed

unistd.h
sys/types.h
sys/socket.h
netdb.h
pwd.h

Compilation

Copy the source code to some folder
Edit the Makefile. Adjust the line
CC=gcc -pedantic -fstrict-aliasing -Wall -Wno-long-long -Werror]
to your liking. A strict standard "-std=c99" cannot be enforced due to the requirement of posix extensions, but something like
CC=gcc -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112L -std=c99 ...
might work.
Run make. The library that your application will need to link to should appear in build/libbdio.a
Your application needs to include bdio.h and be compiled with e.g.
gcc yourapp.c -L <bdio_path>/build/ -I <bdio_path>/include -lbdio

Examples

A very simple application is ex0.c

/* ex0.c
 *
 * A minimal bdio example
 *
 * Tomasz Korzec 2014
 ******************************************************************************/
#include <bdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
   BDIO *fh;
   int x[5] = {1,2,3,4,5};
   /* open bdio file for writing */
   fh = bdio_open( "ex0.bdio", "w", "protocol info goes here" );
   /* start a integer record with user-info 0 and native endianness */
   bdio_start_record( BDIO_BIN_INT32, 0, fh );
   /* write 5 integers twice (5*32bit = 20 byte) and close the BDIO file */
   bdio_write_int32( x, 20, fh );
   bdio_write_int32( x, 20, fh );
   bdio_close( fh );
   /* open bdio file for reading */
   fh = bdio_open( "ex0.bdio", "r", NULL );
   /* move file pointer to the beginning of the first record */
   bdio_seek_record( fh );
   /* read two integers from the file, store them in x, and close the file */
   bdio_read_int32( x, 8, fh );
   bdio_close( fh );
   return( EXIT_SUCCESS );
}

Further simple programs using bdio can be found here