All of the streams you have used so far are known as read-only or write-only streams. The external files of these streams are sequential files that cannot be updated without creating a new file. It is often necessary to modify files or to insert new records into files. Java provides the RandomAccessFile class to allow a file to be read from and write to at random locations.

A random access file consists of a sequence of bytes. There is a special marker called file pointer that is positioned at one of these bytes. A read or write operation takes place at the location of the file pointer. When a file is opened, the file pointer sets at the beginning of the file. When you read or write data to the file, the file pointer moves forward to the next data. For example, if you read an int value using readInt(), the JVM reads four bytes from the file pointer and now the file pointer is four bytes ahead of the previous location.