Gotta love annony monks. Anyway the reason I said it was that it works just fine here on a windows machine so you must be doing "something" different in your script than i am. The following prints your data out.
perl -p -e"BEGIN {}" null.dat
___________
Eric Hodges
$_='y==QAe=e?y==QG@>@?iy==QVq?f?=a@iG?=QQ=Q?9';
s/(.)/ord($1)-50/eigs;tr/6123457/- \/|\\\_\n/;print;