Here is what happens for me when I run that script without editing

C:\>"C:\Documents and Settings\blm\Desktop\test.pl"
##open  (TEMPO, "<c:\\winnt\\temp\\hash.tmp");
while (<TEMPO>)
{
 print;
}

<then a lot of blank lines with some "funny ascii characters" interspe
+rsed>
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For more information about what the above post indicates might be happening read perldoc seek. It says:

On some systems you have to do a seek whenever you switch between reading and writing. Amongst other things, this may have the effect of calling stdio's clearerr(3). A WHENCE of 1 (SEEK_CUR) is useful for not moving the file position:

seek(TEST,0,1);
[download]

Updated: Include the output of the posted sample so everyone can see.

--blm--