Uncrunching files with invalid characters

I've done something similar and it worked fine. Back in the EARLY PC days I was helping set up a company in Canada (Orlikon Aerospace) and we had to post data from a Martin Marietta IBM system to a MicroVax. The company in Canada was using a PC linked to the MicroVax to load the data which had been send from MMC on a pile of 5 1/4" floppy disks. The company in Canada could not get the data to transfer and I was there as a tech rep and knew something about PCs so the job was dumped in my lap. Among other problems, I found that their file transfer program crashed when it encountered certain characters in the data from MMC. I ended up using WordStar in a non-document mode to search for those characters and replace them with Zs. I choose Zs since they were very uncommon in the data and would be easy to find and correct once the data was in the MicroVAX. The beauty of WordStar (besides being one of the FEW PC programs available in that time and location) was that it will open ANY size or type file. At that time the ONLY PC available was an early IBM XT with a 10 Mb hard drive. I erased EVERYTHING off the harddrive even the OS and I was barely able to sqeeze all the data onto it. I even ran WordStar from a floppy disk. I took about 30 hours for WS to replace all of the invalid characters but when it finished we were finally able to load everything into the MicroVAX after 8 months of failed attempts. Joe At 08:46 AM 6/27/06 -0400, you wrote: