On Tue, 2010-02-09 at 15:44 -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > if I load it up in vi then vi claims there is a single blank > space after the colon. > It would be better to use od or beav rather than vi - both use unambiguous notation for non-printable bytes. beav (if you have it) will show you exactly what's there in a scrolling screen. So will "od -c file" if you pipe it through less.
Martin