File Position Pointers

Both istream and ostream provide member functions for repositioning the file-position pointer. These member functions are seekg ("seek get") for istream and seekp ("seek put") for ostream.
The argument to seekg and seekp normally is a long integer. A second argument can be specified to indicate the seek direction. The seek direction can be ios::beg (the default) for positioning relative to the beginning of a stream, ios::cur for positioning relative to the current position in a stream or ios::end for positioning relative to the end of a stream.
The file-position pointer is an integer value that specifies the location in the file as a number of bytes from the file's starting location. Some examples of positioning the "get" file-position pointer are:

// position to the nth byte of fileObject (assumes ios::beg)
fileObject.seekg( n );

// position n bytes forward in fileObject
fileObject.seekg( n, ios::cur );

// position n bytes back from end of fileObject
fileObject.seekg( n, ios::end );

// position at end of fileObject
fileObject.seekg( 0, ios::end );