bob, unformatted in fortran does not mean 'binary' in the classical sense of the word.... unformatted is a compiler unique format that has a header and a trailer record that is used to make movement in the file efficient. g77 and gfortran use either a 32 or 64 bit 'record marker' that contains the size of the record. both gfortran and g77 have routines for reading a file a character at a time. look for fgetc and fputc in the info pages for either compiler. HTH, bud
