thanks to everyone for your earlier replies, but i have yet another problem with file i/o. i'm trying to read multiple lines with the same file, and have been using the following code to take in the first two lines from a file...

fscanf(fileptr, "%d %d %d %d %d %d\n", &n1, &n2, &n3, &n4, &n5, &n6);

...some code in between...

fscanf(fileptr, "%d %d %d %d %d %d\n", &n1, &n2, &n3, &n4, &n5, &n6);

...what ends up happening is that it reads the first line in the file twice without continuing down to the second line. is there some sort of flag or identifier i need to set in order to ensure that the fileptr doesn't reset to the beginning? might i be accidentally resetting the fileptr (though i only use it in fopen, fclose, fscanf) inadvertently? any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks again...

What you're doing should work. Check the return code from fscanf. I'll bet that the 2nd one is failing which is just leaving the variables with the old values.