open

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open To instruct an application that a particular file is required for reading, writing, or both. When a file is opened, its name is passed to the operating system, which locates it and checks that it exists and is available – creating it if necessary – before giving to the application status information and the location of the first record. Once a file has been opened for writing it is normally unavailable to other applications until it has been closed (but see record locking).

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