Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm sure that there is quite a simple solution to this, but so far, I'm not having any luck. I'm redirecting e-mail to a perl script that uses Email::Filter and then does some parsing and forwarding.

I'm using Email::Filter->new() to pull it into a variable. When I forward the message and output the body, every 80th character is replaced with an equals sign. It's clearly representing the new line, but no matter what I can't get rid of them. I've tried using substitution (s/\n\r//gi) and chomp, but neither are clearing them up. I want the message to be in its original form - with the lines concatenated as it was sent.

What am I missing? How can I correct this and get the lines back to their original length?

Thanks,
Doug

Assuming you wish to replace the = sign at 80th position with a new line character, then..

Code:

sed 's/=/\n/80' inputfile > outfile

Thanks.. I may be able to make that work. What I'd like to do is create one string without the newlines or equal signs - just concatenate together. For example, today my text would look like:

line 1 of text= (abbreviated of course)
line 2 of text=
line 3 of text=

But in the original e-mail that is piped in, it looks like:

line 1 of text line 2 of text line 3 of text

Code:

awk -F= '{f?f=f" "$1:f=$1}END{print f}' inputFile

This will take everything before equal sign (=) from all lines in the file and print that in a single line. NOt sure if this is what you want.
If not, pls post input file and expected out.