Best way to store files inside db

I am looking for some help/advice.  We need to store some files inside
postgres (at least it has been requested of us).  What is the best way
to do this?  Right now, the files are all human readable text files, but
that could change.

I could store the contents of the human readable files in a text field,
but I believe the requester would really like the real file to be stored
as close to unmodified as possible.

How can I do this?  I am thinking to store unmodified, I'll have to use
a bytea field.  However, how do I tell the database to insert a file
(say "c:\test.txt") into the table?

Thanks for any help/pointer.

Chris