Quoting Olwe Bottorff <galanolwe at yahoo.com>: > I was reading some BSD code (reverse.c) and came > across this: > ... > bytes(fp, off); > ... > > The man on bytes() defaults to Perl which says > something about "changing character semantics to byte > semantics". I'm guessing this is a BSD function > somewhere (um-manned) that does this sort of thing. > Now why would they want to do that? What is meant by > character v. byte semantics, and why would I be > interested in changing them? look in extern.h for a prototype, read.c should have the definition. BTW I've noticed that you have been posting a lot of C questions. This is just a suggestion, but if you are interested in learning C I'd highly recommend the following steps. 1. Buy "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan & Ritchie 2nd edition http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/ 2. Read "The C Programming Language" 3. Do **ALL** the exercises in "The C Programming Language" 4. Compare your answers to others, suggested sites: http://users.powernet.co.uk/eton/kandr2/ http://www.kamilche.com/c/ 5. Read comp.lang.c FAQ http://c-faq.com/ If you do all that, you will be well on your way to understanding C. -- Lee