Thanks for that insight. I am working on a byte boundary. If I know exactly the bytes I need to keep and the ones I need to throw away is there a simpler method. I will need to extract the same byte positions in every 384 bytes. Using a substituation was the only way I knew how to do it but sounds like you have alot more experience with this. I tried to edit the file using hex in the files original state (which is packed binary on a sun machine running Solaris 5.6) but for every hex character I removed 2 bytes would be extracted. Any thoughts on this. And thanks for the help.