I've been bashing my head against trying to first divide up a file into chunks, for the purpose of sending over sockets. I can read / write a file easily without splitting it into chunks. The code below runs, works, kinda. It will write a textfile and has a garbage character. Which if this was just for txt, no problem. Jpegs aren't working with said garbage. Been at it for a few days, so I've done my research, and it's time to get some help. I do want to stick strictly to binary readers, as this need to handle any file. I've seen a lot of slick examples out there. (none of them worked for me with jpgs) Mostly something along the lines of while(file)... I subscribe to the, if you know the size, use a for-loop, not a while-loop camp. Thank you for the help!! vector<char*> readFile(const char* fn){ vector<char*> v; ifstream::pos_type size; char * memblock; ifstream file; file.open(fn,ios::in|ios::binary|ios::ate); if (file.is_open()) { size = fileS(fn); file.seekg (0, ios::beg); int bs = size/3; // arbitrary. Actual program will use the socket send size int ws = 0; int i = 0; for(i = 0; i < size; i+=bs){ if(i+bs > size) ws = size%bs; else ws = bs; memblock = new char [ws]; file.read (memblock, ws); v.push_back(memblock); } } else{ exit(-4); } return v; } int main(int argc, char **argv) { vector<char*> v = readFile("foo.txt"); ofstream myFile ("bar.txt", ios::out | ios::binary); for(vector<char*>::iterator it = v.begin(); it!=v.end(); ++it ){ myFile.write(*it,strlen(*it)); } }