I want to copy the last 10MB of a possibly large file into another file. Ideally I would use FileInputStream, skip() and then read(). However I'm unsure if the performance of skip() will be bad. Is skip() typically implemented using a file seek underneath or does it actually read and discard data?
I know about RandomAccessFile but I'm interested in whether I could use FileInputStream in place of that (RandomAccessFile is annoying as the API is non-standard).
Depends on your JVM, but here's the source for FileInputStream.skip()
for a recent openjdk:
JNIEXPORT jlong JNICALL
Java_java_io_FileInputStream_skip(JNIEnv *env, jobject this, jlong toSkip) {
jlong cur = jlong_zero;
jlong end = jlong_zero;
FD fd = GET_FD(this, fis_fd);
if (fd == -1) {
JNU_ThrowIOException (env, "Stream Closed");
return 0;
}
if ((cur = IO_Lseek(fd, (jlong)0, (jint)SEEK_CUR)) == -1) {
JNU_ThrowIOExceptionWithLastError(env, "Seek error");
} else if ((end = IO_Lseek(fd, toSkip, (jint)SEEK_CUR)) == -1) {
JNU_ThrowIOExceptionWithLastError(env, "Seek error");
}
return (end - cur);
}
Looks like it's doing a seek()
. However, I don't see why RandomAccessFile
is non-standard. It's part of the java.io
package and has been since 1.0.