Does ofstream close its files automatically?

c++ ofstream
nhtrnm picture nhtrnm · Oct 15, 2012 · Viewed 20.4k times · Source

Possible Duplicate:
do I need to close a std::fstream? 

int main() {
    ofstream a("a.txt");
    a << "A" << endl;
    //a.close();
}

This works fine, but isn't it necessary to close the file at the end of the program?

Answer

Benj picture Benj · Oct 15, 2012

ofstream will close files when its destructor is called, i.e. when it goes out of scope. However, calling close() certainly doesn't do any harm and expresses your intentions to maintenance programmers.

Calling close() also allows you to check if the close() was successful because you can then also check the failbit:

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/ofstream/close/

Related questions

Read file line by line using ifstream in C++

The contents of file.txt are: 5 3 6 4 7 1 10 5 11 6 12 3 12 4 Where 5 3 is a coordinate pair. How do I process this data line by line in C++? I am able to get the first line, but how do I get the next line of the …

Read More
std::ofstream, check if file exists before writing

I am implementing file saving functionality within a Qt application using C++. I am looking for a way to check to see if the selected file already exists before writing to it, so that I can prompt a warning to …

Read More
Writing stringstream contents into ofstream

I'm currently using std::ofstream as follows: std::ofstream outFile; outFile.open(output_file); Then I attempt to pass a std::stringstream object to outFile as follows: GetHolesResults(..., std::ofstream &outFile){ float x = 1234; std::stringstream ss; ss << …

Read More