Re: A very novice question about ascii files

On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, Leslie Johnson - Contractor wrote:

> Actually, I'm not sure because I'm having to download them right now and
> look at them in notepad and I'm sure that's messing it up (for some reason
> VI doesn't seem to be working).

If a line has more than 1024 columns, notepad may not display them
properly either. (I'm guessing a limit like that might be happening
here.)

> They're in columns with column
> headings...granted they're wrapped around a little strangely. Maybe
> somebody out there knows how to change it either way?

A local LUG member was having Progress problems, his files
were non-trivially delimited. It sounds like yours are fixed.
If you do something like
head -1 | wc
head -2 | tail -1 | wc
head -3 | tail -1 | wc

And the wc's all say that lines are a common length,
that would be a real quick indicator of fixed format
output.

Hopefully this gets thigns going for you. I'm off
for the weekend, so hopefully others can pick up
if you need more help (as little as I've helped).

Gord

Matter Realisations http://www.materialisations.com/
Gordon Haverland, B.Sc. M.Eng. President
101 9504 182 St. NW Edmonton, AB, CA T5T 3A7
780/481-8019 ghaverla @ freenet.edmonton.ab.ca