Having an entry that is 78 bits long that contains characters is very strange. Most entries in a file are a stream of 8 bit bytes. So, to split your entries (each of which is 9.75 bytes) into 11 byte lines (your 9.75 bytes per entry plus 2 bits for byte packing and a newline so the output is a text file), you're probably going to find writing a C program to read bytes and rotate bits into the proper positions easier than doing it in a shell script.

What two bits should be added to your entries to produce 10 characters (assuming ASCII or EBCDIC) from your input entries?

If your entries are all 78 bits long, why is your grep looking for a varying number of characters before and after the colon and why is the string it is matching varying from 1 to 76 characters (not bits or bytes) inclusive instead of the 78 bits you specified???

Please show us the first 200 bytes of your input file piped through the command:

Code:

od -bcx