So, that basically says it.Thanks,Etienne

AFAIK open is nonbuffered in memory (kind of direct access) fopen is for buffered IO. I prefer fopen and related functions. Arne Bartels

Pretty interesting. Thanks! :-)

Arnie,What are the advantages of using buffered IO as opposed to non-buffered 'direct-access' IO?

Buffered can be 'faster' as it builds a big chunk of data to write to the drive, where as with unbuffered you could potentially have lots of little writes (meaning more calls to the system ect).Try writing 50MB to a file 1 char at a time using unbuffered i/o and then do exactly the same but using buffered i/o , you should be able to see a differance between the two methods :)Chris

Again, thanks for the insight, Chris! :-hah

Chris,Thanks for the info!