Take a look in perlre. \D is the non-digit class, but maybe that isn't what you want. You'd better look up which control chars you can encounter there and use an custom class. Something like:

s/^[\001-\017\s]{0,2}//;  # char 0 to 15 (and whitespace)
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While we're at it, why not simplify it to a one-liner?

perl -pe 's/^[\001-\017\s]{0,2}//' infile.txt >outfile.txt
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See perlrun for nifty options... the 'i' is also very useful.

Cheers,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)

Update Listen to blackmateria. Of course you use the :cntrl: POSIX class.. much more convenient.