Some good suggestions for cool stuff; but mostly what we need soon (in
my terribly humble opinion, of course) is better coverage of the typical
file actions that are useful in day to day usage.

lineends
filename checking (most platforms have some native api to canonicalize
them)
file testing (existence, size, permissions, date etc)
file create/rename/remove/link (so far as I can see the four
mostly-active ports have access to links, what about any others? what to
do when not there?)
read, write, append, truncate
multiple access - one of my pet peeves is (ab)using files by just
opening them several times.
file copying (there's no api to copy a file from one dir to another!)
directory listing/scanning/creating/removing/renaming/linking
I'd like to suggest that file names ought to be a class separate from
file streams, for example.

I'm sure there must be more, but I'd be happy to get the above list
working.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
"Bother," said Piglet, as Pooh smeared him in honey.