Why does 'fopen' return a NULL pointer?

Question

I'm working on a simple file splitter/merger program in the C programming language. The problem is, for some reason fopen returns NULL, and because of that, my program is crashing at the fwrite statement. How do I fix this?

Here is the C file:

int SplitFile(char* filename, char* output, size_t size)
{
    char current_file_name[256];
    int file_count = 0, i = 0;
    FILE *file = fopen( filename, "rb" );
    printf("split %s into chunks of %d named\n", filename, size);

    if (!file)
       return E_BAD_SOURCE;
    else
    {
        output = (char *) malloc(size * sizeof(char));
        if (output == NULL)
            return E_NO_MEMORY;
        else
        {
            int bytes_read = 0;
            FILE *outFile;
            do
            {
                bytes_read = fread(output, sizeof(char), size, file );
                sprintf(current_file_name, "%s%04lu\n", "part", file_count++);
                outFile = fopen (current_file_name, "wb" );  // THIS RETURNS NULL
                fwrite(output, sizeof(char), bytes_read, outFile); //CRASHES ON THIS LINE
            }
            while ( bytes_read > 0 )
                ;

            //fclose(outFile);
        }
    }
    fclose(file);
    printf("...\n");
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

The proper thing to do is check errno when fopen returns NULL.

I'm going to guess that your problem is that you're trying to write to a filesystem that doesn't allow \n in filenames, but it could be a permissions issue as well.