Reading from text files

I am relevantly confident with lua and other programming languages but I can't get any io function to work with lua.
My aim is to read a password from a text file so that it is changeable but am having trouble with any read or write function.
Can I have some help with commands and syntax.

I have a fs.* tutorial in the tutorials section, I'd recommend you read that.

CC's io.* library is emulated, it actually calls the fs.* functions.