Working with files

The ability to read and manipulate the filesystem is fundamental to server-side programming.

Node's fs module provides this ability.

In this recipe, we'll learn how to read, write, and append to files in a synchronous manner. In the There's more... section, we'll explore how to perform the same operations asynchronously and incrementally.

Getting ready

We'll need a file to read.

We can use the following to populate a file with 1 MB of data:

$ node -p "Buffer.allocUnsafe(1e6).toString()" > file.dat

Allocating buffers
When the Buffer constructor is passed a number, the specified amount of bytes will be allocated from deallocated memory, data in RAM that was previously discarded...