binary data files

[Stan Switzer]

Another alternative definitely worth looking into is Sun's XDR.  XDR
is available via anonymous FTP from titan.rice.edu (the sun-spots
archives) in "sun-source/rpcsrc.*.*".  If you have NFS you already
have XDR.

XDR is an efficient and rather clever scheme for producing flat,
binary, machine-independent representations of arbitrary C data
structures.  It easily allows for pointer chasing, memory allocation,
unions.

Check it out.

Stan Switzer  sjs at ctt.bellcore.com