Forms for Stream WRITE Statements

The forms for stream WRITE statements take the same forms as sequential WRITE statements. A POS specifier may be present to specify at what file position the WRITE will start.

After a formatted stream WRITE where no error occurred, the output file is truncated after the byte with the largest POS value. An unformatted stream WRITE does not truncate the output file.

You can impose a record structure on a formatted, sequential stream by using a new-line character as a record terminator (see intrinsic function NEW_LINE). There is no record structure in an unformatted, sequential stream.

The INQUIRE statement can be used with the POS specifier to determine the current file position in a stream file.