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

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