Wow! What an awesome group and resource. Five answers in twenty minutes. 
Responding more or less to everyone

- I realized after I hit send what I had implied but failed to state: the file 
is "binary" -- that is, many of the characters are not printable -- basic 
"mainframey" data. I suspect that editing it under Windows would be problematic.
- I have both Rexx and assembler skills. Yeah, I was thinking that if there 
were not another approach I might write a little Rexx program.
- The sed approach looks interesting. I have very basic UNIX skills so it would 
be a little bit of a challenge.
- What I like best I think is Dave Salt's approach. The file is only 36+K. I 
suspect it is a couple of hundred records at most. I could pretty easily do a 
FIND on the hex "delimiter", do an eyeball check on whether it was a real 
record boundary or a false positive (I can recognize the start of a real 
record), and then either hit REFIND or a PF key that invoked a macro that split 
the record at that point. Easier to debug than the Rexx program, and no false 
splits to repair. I will still have to re-join the records that currently break 
erroneously at the FB boundaries. Whoever it was, thanks for the TF suggestion 
-- that should work.

I confess I have never written an ISPF edit macro. (I wrote a bunch for XEDIT 
back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.) Dave, if you wanted to consider this 
"contacting you" you could send me whatever clues you wanted. I think you can 
make out my e-mail but if not it is charlesm at mcn dot org. I think I just 
need a PF-key-invocable macro that would split a record at the cursor position, 
putting the character under the cursor into the latter record.

Hmmm, it's currently FB. I will have to first copy it into a VB dataset so that 
short records stay that way.

Thanks all!

Charles

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of Paul Gilmartin
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 9:25 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Break a dataset into new record boundaries?

On Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:21:37 -0600, Roberts, John J wrote:
>
>If binary, I would just write a one-off ASM program to recover the original 
>records.  It's probably a 30 minute task, easier than trying to learn anything 
>new. 

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