On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Jim wrote: > > At that point, the next recourse I can think of is to open up > > the file in a good hex editor (or a text editor that won't > > mangle things up like Vim or Emacs) and see if you can puzzle > > out any patterns. > > Tried that and also tried the unix strings command. No help
I didn't mean to suggest that it would be *easy*, but at this point I think your only way of getting any traction -- short of getting the vendor to help you or getting your new vendor to take a look -- is to just sit down and start looking for patterns. > > How big is the data file, out of curiosity? > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ wc -c LPAS188.RED > 169567897 LPAS188.RED # bytes in the file > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ wc -l LPAS188.RED > 354543 LPAS188.RED $ lines in the file > > with those numbers. but I doubt the file is line delimited `wc` probably isn't the right tool to look at binary data. How about a simple `du` command? $ du -sh LPAS188.RED Do you get something like 161.7M ? I can see where that might be unweildy in a text editor... :-) > It is just a data file of mtg loan stats. It uses a GUI to report and > do what you like with the data. Problem is, the company i am working > for no longer uses the vendor, so we can't use the GUI to look at this > data and I dout the tech support will give me any help since we don't > pay them anymore :) > > Thanks for the help Have any backups? Paper reports? If all else fails, you could always hire some interns and turn it into a massive data [re-]entry project, provided that a paper trail exists... -- Chris Devers -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>