how do you open a binary file?

[brokenbot]

when i open text files with the fstream using ofstream or ifstream they work fine if i enter unique names or names already found in the directory/folder...

now when i do binary files i can never open them...

the program compiles and runs correctly, but i just can seem to open a file.

is there a suffix i need to use?
like bin?
hi.bin for binary

or
hi.txt for text

[helios]

Filenames, extensions included, are no more meaningful than variable names.

Even if the file is binary, opening it as text shouldn't fail. It would only do a newline translation and a few other things.
To open a file as binary: std::ifstream file("filename",std::ios::binary);

[brokenbot]

whats wrong with my code then? also what importance does binary files have?

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

int get_int(int default_value);
char name[20];

int main() 
{
string filename;

int n;
int age;
int recsize = sizeof(name) + sizeof(int);

cout << "Enter file name: ";
getline(cin, filename);

fstream fbin;
fbin.open(filename.c_str(), ios::binary | ios::in | ios::out);
if (! fbin)
{
cout << "Could not open file " << filename;
return -1;
}

cout << "Enter file record number: ";
n = get_int(0);

cout << "Enter name: ";
cin.getline(name, 19);
cout << "Enter age: ";
age = get_int(0);


fbin.seekp(n * recsize);
fbin.write(name, 20);
fbin.write(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&age), sizeof(int));
fbin.close();
return 0;
}


int get_int(int default_value) 
{
char s[81];

cin.getline(s, 80);
if (strlen(s) == 0)
return default_value;
return atoi(s);
}