The file position indicator is another concept introduced by the stdio.h header. Each opened stream has a file position indicator acting as a cursor within a file. The file position indicator marks the character position of the next read or write operation. A read or write operation advances the file position indicator. Other functions are available to adjust the indicator without reading or writing, thus providing random access to a file.

Note that console streams, stdin, stdout, and stderr in particular, do not have file position indicators.