How to construct a c++ fstream from a POSIX file descriptor?

Question

I'm basically looking for a C++ version of fdopen(). I did a bit of research on this and it is one of those things that seems like it should be easy, but turns out to be very complicated. Am I missing something in this belief (i.e. it really is easy)? If not, is there a good library out there somewhere to handle this?

EDIT: Moved my example solution to a separate answer.

Answer 1

From the answer given by Éric Malenfant:

AFAIK, there is no way to do this in standard C++. Depending on your platform, your implementation of the standard library may offer (as a nonstandard extension) a fstream constructor taking a file descriptor as input. (This is the case for libstdc++, IIRC) or a FILE*.

Based on above observations and my research below there's working code in two variants; one for libstdc++ and another one for Microsoft Visual C++.

---

libstdc++

There's non-standard __gnu_cxx::stdio_filebuf class template which inherits std::basic_streambuf and has the following constructor

stdio_filebuf (int __fd, std::ios_base::openmode __mode, size_t __size=static_cast< size_t >(BUFSIZ)) 

with description This constructor associates a file stream buffer with an open POSIX file descriptor.

We create it passing POSIX handle (line 1) and then we pass it to istream's constructor as basic_streambuf (line 2):

#include <ext/stdio_filebuf.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    ofstream ofs("test.txt");
    ofs << "Writing to a basic_ofstream object..." << endl;
    ofs.close();

    int posix_handle = fileno(::fopen("test.txt", "r"));

    __gnu_cxx::stdio_filebuf<char> filebuf(posix_handle, std::ios::in); // 1
    istream is(&filebuf); // 2

    string line;
    getline(is, line);
    cout << "line: " << line << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

---

Microsoft Visual C++

There used to be non-standard version of ifstream's constructor taking POSIX file descriptor but it's missing both from current docs and from code. There is another non-standard version of ifstream's constructor taking FILE*

explicit basic_ifstream(_Filet *_File)
    : _Mybase(&_Filebuffer),
        _Filebuffer(_File)
    {   // construct with specified C stream
    }

and it's not documented (I couldn't even find any old documentation where it would be present). We call it (line 1) with the parameter being the result of calling _fdopen to get C stream FILE* from POSIX file handle.

#include <cstdio>
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
    ofstream ofs("test.txt");
    ofs << "Writing to a basic_ofstream object..." << endl;
    ofs.close();

    int posix_handle = ::_fileno(::fopen("test.txt", "r"));

    ifstream ifs(::_fdopen(posix_handle, "r")); // 1

    string line;
    getline(ifs, line);
    ifs.close();
    cout << "line: " << line << endl;
    return 0;
}