> Strangely, it appeared to do nothing at all when I specified the directory. On Unix systems, at least, directories can be fopen()ed just like files, and they contain binary content. It sounds like perhaps yours started with a NUL byte which ended the "sql" the shell thought it was reading. That's *actually* correct behavior, but the shell could arguably check whether it's a directory before opening it. (The same thing bit me in another piece of software a few years ago.)