Hello, Consider this little function (not concerned about efficiency here) m=function(r) { a<-serialize(r,NULL); zz<-rawConnection(raw(0),"r+"); writeBin(length(a),zz); c(rawConnectionValue(zz),a)} a=m(10) p=rawConnection(a,"r+"); u=readBin(p,"int") unserialize(p) Error in unserialize(p) : unknown input format But isn't p a connectio?From ?unserialize 'unserialize' reads an object (as written by 'serialize') from 'connection' or a raw vector. Also, seek(p,where=NA) returns 0 when it should return 5. I could do unserialize( a[ 5:(5+u)] ) but sticking with the connection would be nicer. Cheers Saptarshi