Hi, The boost.serialization library seems to use eod-of-stream in the underlying istream object to denote the end-of-archive. This equivalence might make sense with files where the stream is open for a short time and really associated with a single archive, but seems to be cumbersome when used with streams that are supposed to be long-lived (network sessions?) and used for transmission of many separate archives. The problem arises between two applications that want to use serializatioin library for data exchange "on the fly", using network sockets. Small tests have shown that it's not enough for the sender to flush its output streams (although it does result in the archive's data arriving at the destination side). For the archive to be read correctly, the sender needs to entirely close the connection. This indicates that the end-of-stream condition is used to denote end-of-archive in the serialization sense. Taking into account the interface of the serialization library (where the readers are created from streams), where the stream object is syntactically supposed to live longer than the archive, treating eof as eoa is counterintuitive. I really expect this to work for the receiver: std::istream &is = ...; // some input stream, possibly long-lived while (...) { boost::archive::text_iarchive ar(is); // ... } with similar structure on the sender-side. Any thoughts? -- Maciej Sobczak : http://www.msobczak.com/ Programming : http://www.msobczak.com/prog/