On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 06:13:40AM -0700, Hiep Nguyen wrote: > yes, corruption indeed, but i want to study why the program writes ^@ to > this file. It's mostly likely not an ASCII file; it's probably UTF16 or similar so there are two bytes for every character, but the high byte is 0x00 which shows as ^@. If this is true then tr -d '\000' < badfile > goodfile will most likely fix it. -- rgds Stephen