using fopen and fread with /dev/sda

Last night I accidentally deleted quite a few files I had been working on for the past month or so. So, after freaking out for a little while and after trying unsuccessfully to use grep on the unmounted partition (it ran out of memory...haha) I decided I may as well learn something from this and so I am using another computer to write a program (in c) to read directly from my hard drive (/dev/sda) and search for a specific string while using only a reasonable amount of memory (grep was using all 8GB). I now have my computer I deleted the files on running off of a flash drive so that it doesn't harm the data on the hard drive, but I have a few questions about using fopen and fread to read data from /dev/sda (sorry if I have too many questions...I just want to be certain this will work): Would fopen treat /dev/sda just like any other file? When using fread on a /dev/sd* file will it return less than the requested bytes when it gets to the end of the hard drive? Would fread read directly from /dev/sda or would it try to copy it into memory first? Do I have to worry about memory problems if I try to read another 100MB after already reading 8GB (the amount of memory I have on my computer) even though I have free'd the memory that I had it read into? My program as I have it functions more or less as follows: Code: FILE* inputStream = fopen("/dev/sda", "rb"); //...stuff to check to make sure it actually opened it //... //...the following is inside of a loop... char* memoryChunk = malloc(100000000); //allocate 100mb for the chunk to be read unsigned long int actualReadBytes = fread(memoryChunk, 1, 100000000, inputStream); //...memoryChunk is processed... free(memoryChunk); if (actualReadBytes < 100000000) {       //...exit the loop since that means the last chunk read was the end of /dev/sda } //...after the loop and everything fclose(inputStream);

URL: