Problem ------- Your fortran refuses to read the unformatted fortran files made on another system. Diagnosis --------- Your computer stores bytes with opposite endianness. OR Your version of mangle was compiled using the gfortran fortran compiler, but you are trying to read unformatted fortran files produced with g77 fortran code. Solution -------- Download the formatted version of the masks available in the "data" section of the mangle website http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mangle/ and use these instead. Another Solution ---------- WARNING: The following hack works only if each number in the unformatted fortran file is a single word, i.e. an INTEGER or REAL (not DOUBLE PRECISION). On a 32-bit machine, each word contains 4 bytes. The following converts files to the opposite endianness using cpio, a command famous for its obtuseness. 1. Make a cpio archive file from the original files, as in ls -1 file1 file2 ... | cpio -o > files.cpio Notice that the switch -1 is a one, not an ell. 2. Move the cpio archive to another directory where it will not overwrite the old files mv files.cpio other_directory 3. Extract the files from the cpio archive in the new directory cd other_directory cpio -i -b < files.cpio The -b switch is the thing that does the byte-swapping in each word.