Well, open is just an alias for file, so my novice butt is guessing bugfix. And once you've opened it; it doesn't seem there's much you can do with it anyway. (this is in 2.2) >>> x = file('.', 'rb') >>> x.readline() Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#11>", line 1, in ? x.readline() IOError: [Errno 21] Is a directory Keith