As a first project I have been writing a short program to render the Mandelbrot fractal. I have got to the point of trying to output my results to a file ( e.g. .bmp or .ppm ) and got stuck. I have not really found any examples of exactly what I am trying to do, but I have found two examples of code to copy from one file to another. The examples in the Gforth documentation ( Section 3.27 ) did not work for me ( winXP ) in fact they seemed to open and create files but not write to files properly. This is the Gforth documentation example that copies the contents of one file to another: 0 Value fd-in 0 Value fd-out : open-input ( addr u -- ) r/o open-file throw to fd-in ; : open-output ( addr u -- ) w/o create-file throw to fd-out ; s" foo.in" open-input s" foo.out" open-output : copy-file ( -- ) begin line-buffer max-line fd-in read-line throw while line-buffer swap fd-out write-line throw repeat ; I found this example ( http://rosettacode.org/wiki/File_IO#Forth ) which does work. The main problem is that I can't isolate the part that writes to a file and have it still work. The main confusion is that r doesn't seem to consume TOS as I might expect. : copy-file2 ( a1 n1 a2 n2 -- ) r/o open-file throw >r w/o create-file throw r> begin pad maxstring 2 pick read-file throw ?dup while pad swap 3 pick write-file throw repeat close-file throw close-file throw ; \ Invoke it like this: s" output.txt" s" input.txt" copy-file I would be very grateful if someone could explain exactly how the open, create read and write -file words actually work, as my investigation keeps resulting in somewhat bizarre stacks. Any clues as to why the Gforth examples do not work might help too. In summary, I want to output from Gforth to a file and so far have been thwarted. Can anyone offer any help? Thank you Vijay, I think that I understand the example that you gave. However when I try to use something like this ( which I think is similar ): 0 value test-file : write-test s" testfile.out" w/o create-file throw to test-file s" test text" test-file write-line ; I get ok but nothing is put into the file, have I made a mistake? It seems that the problem was due to not flushing the relevant buffers or explicitly closing the file. Adding something like test-file flush-file throw or test-file close-file throw between write-line and ; makes it work. Thanks again Vijay for helping.