Hi,

This may be the wrong topic for this question, but I'm looking for advice/best practices for editing existing files in Windows.

Let's say we have a very large file and you just need to remove the 20th byte in the file. I understand if there are bytes at the end, you can truncate it, but the beginning seems trickier. In the meantime, I'm going the rewrite route.

For less complicated, maybe smaller files, and depending on the needs, it may be advantageous to save parts of the file as separate files and just update each one. But what about much larger files and the case where there is only one file being edited? Rewriting the entire file seems like it would take a huge performance hit for a small removal.


Thanks a lot

There's no way around rewriting the rest of the file.
File formats are usually designed in a way that such cutting doesn't happen often.

That's too bad, but it makes sense if sequential addressing would become disjointed with gaps in the file.

Appreciated. Will need to research this more, but at least this allows us to get creative and come up with our own solutions.

If the file is a simple linear format, like a text file, then your only option in all officially supported Windows file systems is to rewrite the entire remainder of the file.

But if the file is more structured, like exe or dll files, then in many cases you will only need to rewrite the affected section.