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Asked: 2026-05-26T12:46:18+00:00

I’m adding some functionality to an existing code base that uses pure C functions

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I’m adding some functionality to an existing code base that uses pure C functions (fopen, fwrite, fclose) to write data out to a file. Unfortunately I can’t change the actual mechanism of file i/o, but I have to pre-allocate space for the file to avoid fragmentation (which is killing our performance during reads). Is there a better way to do this than to actually write zeros or random data to the file? I know the ultimate size of the file when I’m opening it.

I know I can use fallocate on linux, but I don’t know what the windows equivalent is.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Programatically, on Windows you have to use Win32 API functions to do this:

    SetFilePointerEx() followed by SetEndOfFile()

    You can use these functions to pre-allocate the clusters for the file and avoid fragmentation. This works much more efficiently than pre-writing data to the file. Do this prior to doing your fopen().

    If you want to avoid the Win32 API altogether, you can also do it non-programatically using the system() function to issue the following command:

    fsutil file createnew filename filesize
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