Hi Sofia, Support for accessing the file descriptor for an fstream has been removed for two reasons: 1) allowing it is in violation of the ISO 14882 specification 2) not all operating systems have file descriptors, and as such, it makes for non-portable code When does a person want to access the file descriptor? Well, for file locking purposes / record locking / range locking purposes. That kind of functionality is, usually, very OS specific. (Some OS's need to have a locking-enabled kernel compiled, special.) For those kinds of purposes, an fstream is the wrong thing to use to access the file. --Eljay
