Sequential Access

• The simplest access method is sequential access. Information in the file is processed in order, one record after the other.
• This mode of access is by far the beginning current position most common; for example, editors and compilers usually access files in this fashion.
• Reads and writes make up the bulk of the operations on a file.
  • A read operation read next reads the next portion of the file and automatically advances a file pointer, which tracks the I/O location.
  • Similarly, the write operation write next appends to the end of the file and advances to the end of the newly written material (the new end of file).

  Figure 7: Sequential-access file.

  
• Sequential access, which is depicted in Fig. 7, is based on a tape model of a file and works as well on sequential-access devices as it does on random-access ones.