random seeking in binary file

[andrews2004]

Hi there,

I am new to fortran and i am writing some code to read a stata (a statistical package) binary file. i am using the open command with form='binary' and i have successfully managed to read all the information from the header of the file which tells me all i need to know about the actual data.

i want to be able to change the position i am reading in the file so that i can just extract specific data. does anybody know how i can do this?

thanks!

 

[xwb]

You also need to open with ACCESS='DIRECT', RECL=x where x is your record length in bytes. The system works on fixed length records. What you can get away with depends on your system. GNU allows RECL=1.

Say you managed to OPEN channel 10 with RECL=1 and you want to read an integer N from position 5798,

      READ(10,REC=5798) N

Note that this assumes unformatted data so it is possibly 4 to 8 bytes for an integer, depending on your architecture.