Well i thought it was that, but the file is being created on windows and you can see the ^A after each character that i am trying to extract. T did try a search and replace on ASCII chars $_ =~ s/\x41\x88//g; Which should be the ^A but that did not work. it is very strange if you open this line of the file in VI you see the ^A but if you more the file or cat it you don't