What you think is logical, just need not be. Iwas coding this little snippet in C++, in which i was reopening a ifstream. Now however hard i tried, any operations on the reopened stream just wouldn't work. After a good amount of googling, figured out that this is an FAQ!! Now who would have thought that a close after an open wouldn't clear all internal flags, and that we would have to call a clear() on the stream as well?