UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a tab delimited file of record length 250.

since i dont have a tool like vedit, how do i check what's there between 230-235 bytes.

If i open it in VI editor everything appears topsy turvy and it's hard to figure out where the the first line ends or what lies between certain range of bytes

Becasue of limitation, i go thru the painstaking process of ftp'ing the file onto my client windows desktop and open the file with wordpad and counting the bytes mannualy

Any solution to this problem greatly appreciated

You could use tr and cut....

tr \\t \\n < input_file | cut -c 230-235

where 230-235 is the range of bytes you want to view within each tab-delimeted record.

Cheers
ZB