Dear Corion, pemungkah, johngg, swampyankee, Thank you all so much for the replies.. I guess what I'm after is simply code simplification, the data is all character-based, no binary, i just wanted to do either EQUIVALENCE, or use the VMS Fortran's capability to do STRUCTUREs, so the the first 10 chars of INREC mapped directly to COLUMN1, the next 10 mapped directly to COLUMN2, and so forth. I've already done it with the following snippets.. $CDXCODE = NibbleItOff(8); where NibbleItOff is defined as:

######################################################################
+###############
sub NibbleItOff {
    my $Field_Length = shift;
    my $Output_String;

#print "NibbleItOff>>inrec->$inrec<\n"; print "NibbleItOff>>Field_Leng
+th->$Field_Length<\n";
    $Output_String = substr( $inrec, 0, $Field_Length );
    $inrec         = substr( $inrec, $Field_Length );

#print "NibbleItOff>>inrec->$inrec<\n"; print "NibbleItOff>>Output_Str
+ing->$Output_String<\n";
    return $Output_String;
}
######################################################################
+###############
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using either EQUIVALENCE, or appropiate STRUCTUREs, that could be eliminated.. Just a passing thought... I'll gladly look up the UNPACK, but it seems to be for binary data, tho.. Thanks for all the hints!!! Jim