Possible upgrades to gzfilebuf: - The ability to do putback (e.g. putbackfail) - The ability to seek (zlib supports this, but could be slow/tricky) - Simultaneous read/write access (does it make sense?) - Support for ios_base::ate open mode - Locale support? - Check public interface to see which calls give problems (due to dependence on library internals) - Override operator<<(ostream&, gzfilebuf*) to allow direct copying of stream buffer to stream ( i.e. os << is.rdbuf(); )