Difference in using read/write when stream is opened with/without ios::binary mode

Question

In my experiments with the following code snippet, I did not find any particular difference whether i created the streams with/without the ios:binary mode:

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Answer 1

When you want to write files in binary, with no modifications taking place to your data, specify the ios::binary flag. When you want to write files in text mode, don't specify ios::binary, and you may get things like line ending translation. If you're on a UNIX-like platform, binary and text formats are the same, so you won't see any difference.

Answer 2

The only difference between binary and text mode is how the '\n' character is treated.

In binary mode there is no translation.

In text mode \n is translated on write into a the end of line sequence.
In text mode end of line sequence is translated on read into \n.

The end of line sequence is platform dependant.

Examples:

ASCII based systems:

LF    ('\0x0A'):      Multics, Mac OS X, BeOS, Amiga, RISC OS
CRLF  ('\0x0D\0x0A'): Microsoft Windows, DEC TOPS-10, RT-11
CR:   ('\0x0D'):      TRS-80, Mac OS Pre X
RS:   ('\0x1E'):      QNX pre-POSIX implementation.