C data structure to disk

Question

How can I make a copy of a tree data structure in memory to disk in C programming language?

Answer 1

The basic pieces here are:

• The C file I/O routines are fopen, fwrite, fprintf, etc.
• Copying pointers to disk is useless, since the next time you run all those pointer values will be crap. So you'll need some alternative to pointers that still somehow refers disk records to each other. One sensible alternative would be file indexes (the kind used by your C I/O routines like fseek and ftell).

That should be about all the info you need to do the job.

Alternatively, if you use an array-based tree (with array indexes instead of pointers, or with the links implied by their position in the array) you could just save and load the whole shebang without any further logic required.