For what it's worth, I don't consider this a problem with newlines either. That is just a standard limitation of C's seek() for non-byte-stream files. I never use seek to skip byte offsets. MacOS has a different newline but has byte-stream files. Other operating systems don't even have newlines and don't have byte-stream files and so tell doesn't give you a byte offset anyway (if gives you a record number and an offset within that, for example).

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")