thankyou, that seemed to do the trick, but presents a new problem of having to close the filestream and reopen a new one to change from reading to writing and so on, I should be able to have both specified, as i've done it before. Thankyou for the help, I wanted the fstream as a pointer because I'm stupid and don't know how to check and see if the stream is open or not. If you know how to do that it would be helpfull, or point me to a tutorial please so i can stop badgering you.
