From: Daniel Sheppard Date: 2007-10-04T13:06:51+09:00 Subject: Re: Binary data, command output, and Ruby > good = File.open( 'gkhead.jpg', 'rb' ){ |f| f.read } > test = `curl -s http://phrogz.net/tmp/gkhead.jpg` I would hazard a guess that if you took that 'b' off of the File.open, you'd get the same bytes `` is returning?