Thanks guys, I think it was the "type" that got me into trouble. I also used a function in order to read N first

Code:
int findN(FILE* input)
{
int N;
fscanf(input, "%d", &N);
return(N);
}
In terms or my malloc statement, yes I was trying to allocate memory for my array with 3*N space. How should I do this instead?

Code:
ptr = malloc(N*3*sizeof(double));
Also, my code now works for the input I specified in my original post, but now I want to add a description line to it

Code:
    4
description that includes spaces up to 80 characters or less
O   -0.906801    0.569837    0.066005
O    0.956585   -0.258900    0.342064
O   -0.962633    0.494832    0.380356
O   -0.259093    0.292540    0.854958
fscanf will only read to whitespace and I need to read it to a character string but what I tried didn't work...

Code:
char buf[81];

fgets(buf, sizeof buf, input);
printf("Description is %s", buf);
any ideas would be great

Thanks a lot