Woohooo! Looks like gcc-3.*/libstdc++-v3 has re-instated a filebuf constructor that accepts an integer file descriptor! Back in 2001, when I was an early adopter of libstdc++-v3, I really tried to make the case that this non-standard extension to iostreams was completely necessary to maintain backward compatibility with legacy C++ code written exclusively for g++. I painfully worked around the problem (who wants to do an fdopen on a socket handle just to use iostreams?), but I was never happy with the result. Big thanks to whomever got this done.