File reading.

Indeed it was the 'file' command that I was missing.  Passing this object
through to 'scan' does what I was looking for.

a<-file("Xtemp", "r", blocking = TRUE)
b<-scan(a, what=list(nx=0, ny=0), n=2)

Read 1 records

c<-scan(a, what=list(xlab=0), n=b$nx)

Read 39 records

The 'scan' documentation doesn't really explain this very well...

|     scan(file = "", what = double(0), nmax = -1, n = -1, sep = "",
|          quote = if (sep=="\n") "" else "'\"", dec = ".",
|          skip = 0, nlines = 0, na.strings = "NA",
|          flush = FALSE, fill = FALSE, strip.white = FALSE, quiet = FALSE,
|          blank.lines.skip = TRUE, multi.line = TRUE)

Thanks!
Randall

Maybe try file(), open(), and readLines(), see Brian Ripley's introduction
to using connections in R-News number 1, pages 16-17.

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