Hi -- ok, Sina, on the other list you said I was taking the wrong approach. That is altogether possible as I am pushing up against a few awkward bits of code that should not be necessary, IMO, and I think you agree. The awkwardness I am experiencing comes when a method needs to call another method from another package, not written by me. My class is now compiling, and I think should work, but I am having problems with the test.main method. What I'm wondering is either how to initialize this Byte array with the characters of "This is a test.". javac keeps barfing on that. I pass this byte array to a method in my class, as input to the OutputStream I am writing to. The reason I am passing this is because the OutputStream/InputStream classes and their descendants contain the following definitions respectively: void write(Byte[] buf, int startPos, int len ) int read(Byte[] buf, int startPos, len); Comments? TIA --le