PLEASE HONOR NAME CHOICES
Oh No! We now have a csv file with one million records in it, titled 'MillionSongCSV.csv'
You are to use the functionality of Assignment 0 to make a permanent(ish) database of the
ordered song data you have extracted from MillionSongCSV.csv. You are to do this with two programs:
The first is BuildDataBase -- this will put the structs you have extracted from the original file
into a file called BinarySongData. In addition there will be a 'directory' that contains the
correspondence between the song names and the offset of that song struct. This directory will be
sorted. You will write the directory as a separate file. After BuildDataBase the above information
has been created and the program terminates
The second is UseDataBase - this will open the file(s) created above and allow a user to ask for a
song name and be presented with the song information (formatted reasonably). For both of the
above you MUST use Chapter 3 raw I/O system calls. NO 'F' WORDS (fopen, fwrite, fread,
fseek, etc).
You will create your own buffer for reading to and from files. The buffer size will be defined
with a #define directive BUFFSIZE with a value that is 4096. The UseDataBase interface will
prompt the user for a song name and exit when 'ZZZ' is entered. Same as before. You will
submit a) the two programs above along with any headers you have created, which MUST be
named BuildDataBase.c and UseDataBase.c
Another makefile and sample input data file has been provided. Name your programs so that the
command 'make && make build && make use' compiles and runs both programs.
Discussion
This assignment will clarify the distinction between a) system calls and libraries built on top of
them (‘standard library’), and b) buffered and unbuffered I/O. The previous assignment allowed,
for example, the use of fgets() to extract lines from a file fopen()ed as a ‘stream’ or FILE* object.
This assignment will open() and reference the file using the integer ‘file descriptor’. The use of
stdout vs STDOUT_FILENO illustrates this distinction. You now must find the ‘lines’ in the file
yourself. Think in terms of writing your own ‘GetLine’ which you must do by finding the ‘\n’
delimited characters. Note that a line can span multiple buffer fills. Isolating that work will allow
you to reuse much of the previous assignment.
The idea of a ‘binary’ file vs an ‘ascii’ file is also highlighted here. The data written to the
database, and to the directory does not need to be read by humans so don’t waste the bytes.
Please honor our name choices so we can test more easily.
