Björn, Robert, Thanks... almost there. The strings command got rid of the binary garbage and effectively deleted the first line. I'm still left with a bunch of ASCII garbage at the end of the file. Using sed, I did the following: sed '/Pattern/, $d' OldFile > NewFile Which almost works perfectly! The only problem is that sed omits the Pattern along with the lines that follow it. I want it to omit only everything after Pattern, so the resulting file ends with Pattern. I've done about 15 minutes of looking on a website but cannot get any syntax to work. Thanks in advance for anymore help, Ben