is the inverse of fopen, it breaks the connection between the file pointer and the external name that was established by fopen, freeing the file pointer for another file. Since most operating systems have some limit on the number of files that a program may have open simultaneously, it's a good idea to free the file pointers when they are no longer needed, as we did in cat. There is also another reason for fclose on an output file - it flushes the buffer in which putc is collecting output. fclose is called automatically for each open file when a program terminates normally. (You can close stdin and stdout if they are not needed. They can also be reassigned by the library function freopen.)