How to read a binary file into a variable

[john_phx]

I'm trying to increase the performance of a program that concatenates binary file parts into a single file. Each of the parts is contained in a binary file. The existing app simply takes the first part, renames it, then concatenates each additional part to that file

I'd like to check the user's system for available heap space and calculate how many parts I can hold in memory, read the files into variables, concatenate the variables together, and write the result into a binary file "AAA.bin", then do the same thing with the next set of parts into "AAB.bin", and so on, finally using file object to concatenate all my .bin files together

Unless I'm mis-calculating, assuming the user has 200 meg or so of heap available, my algorithm could cut file I/O in half or more

I've looked and looked and everything I find about working with files, just lets you have a pointer to the file (which wouldn't give me any savings in file I/O

Specifically...does anyone know how to find out how much heap is available, and then how to get a binary copy of a file onto the heap

TIA

John Crocket
jo************@hotNOSPAMmail.com (remove NOSPAM)