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Asked: 2026-05-24T00:33:38+00:00

It looks like this question is pretty simple but I can’t find the clear

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It looks like this question is pretty simple but I can’t find the clear solution for copying files in C without platform dependency.

I used a system() call in my open source project for creating a directory, copying files and run external programs. It works very well in Mac OS X and other Unix-ish systems, but it fails on Windows. The problem was:

system( "cp a.txt destination/b.txt" );
  • Windows uses backslashes for path separator. (vs slashes in Unix-ish)
  • Windows uses ‘copy’ for the internal copy command. (vs cp in Unix-ish)

How can I write a copying code without dependency?

( Actually, I wrote macros to solve this problems, but it’s not cool. http://code.google.com/p/npk/source/browse/trunk/npk/cli/tests/testutil.h, L22-56 )

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You need to use the C standard library functions in stdio.h.

    In particular, fopen, fread, fwrite, and fclose will be sufficient.

    Be sure to include the b (“binary”) option in the flags to fopen.

    [edit]

    Unfortunately, the file names themselves (forward-slashes vs. back-slashes) are still platform dependent. So you will need some sort of #ifdef or similar to deal with that.

    Or you can use a cross-platform toolkit.

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