Well, it's time to sum up the efforts of all you good folks out there who tried to relieve my ignorance. I want to thank you all for the information (even Aaron was helpful) you imparted and the spirit of helpfulness for what was clearly an off topic post.
First <cntrl-v> is a very nice new trick to know about, but it only worked for the tab. Cntrl-v cntrl-j did, in fact, produce the expected line feed, but bash then passed it as two lines and sed didn't get what it expected. My final solution to the -<newline> was to use beav to edit the file and do a search on 2D 0A replacing it with nothing. This worked very well, although it isn't the sed solution. It seems that none of the solutions presented allowed sed to find and replace the -<newline> character pair. From what I have read and tried elsewhere some of the presented solutions should have worked. Reading up on bash, I found the variable NEWLINE, but the line 'sed s/-$NEWLINE//g' produced no better results than any of the other suggestions. I must assume from this that sed treats the newline character as a special character that it does not use for comparisons. While this is only conjecture it fits what several folks said with respect to this "special" character. In any case, while it wasn't sed, I have a solution that gets me down the road, and I enjoyed the discussion very much. Thanks to all who helped. I will do my part to keep my comments more on topic in the future ;-) Luck, Dwarf -- _-_-_-_-_-_- _-_-_-_-_-_-_- aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (904) 656-9769 Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tallahassee, FL 32308 _-_-_-_-_-_- If you don't see what you want, just ask _-_-_-_-_-_-_- -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .