i think my best bet would be to read the pointers into memory like $pointers (or what is already there) then i can seek and read each line and then do a regex to remove newline characters. then if the line is 2 characters, i can write it to file, if it is three characters, i will have to rewind one byte address, and then write. im sorry, i know in my head what i need, and its very hard for me to help anyone else understand. i need to calculate the pointer values, and my original code explain how in the while loop. but i need to calculate the pointer values, then write them back into the file at the appropriate offsets (starting at a static 0x44 per file, then seek 20 moire bytes and write pointer and seek 20 bytes and write pointer, over and over per file)