Without detailed information about how it's supposedly line terminated, it's tricky to come up with a suggestion. Regular DOS files have CR/LF line terminators, which count as line terminators in Unix too (seeing as Unix uses just LF, and regards the DOS CR before it as just another control character). Can you display a hex dump of, say, the first few dozen characters, enough to see where the first line break is supposed to be? (Try hexdump test.out | head or xxd test.out | head or od -test.out | head)