Article 6091 of comp.lang.perl:
Xref: feenix.metronet.com comp.lang.perl:6091
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Path: feenix.metronet.com!news.ecn.bgu.edu!willis1.cis.uab.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!math.fu-berlin.de!zib-berlin.de!news.dfn.de!rzsun2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de!news.rrz.uni-hamburg.de!lutzifer!ccwnoc.hanse.de!lip!lipka
From: lipka@lip.hanse.de (Michael Lipka)
Subject: Re: dBase Interface and Utilities (?)
In-Reply-To: mbgordy@athena.mit.edu's message of 18 Sep 1993 16:01:39 GMT
References: <27fbd3$587@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>
Sender: lipka@lip.hanse.de (Michael Lipka)
Organization: Hanse Networking
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1993 17:30:35 GMT
Message-ID: <LIPKA.93Sep23173035@lip.hanse.de>
Reply-To: lipka@lip.hanse.de
Lines: 31

In article <27fbd3$587@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> mbgordy@athena.mit.edu (Michael B Gordy) writes:

   I have large dbf (dBase III) files that I need to cut up according to
   a variety of criteria.  Could anyone point me to a perl package that can
   handle this format?

No, but it's absolutly simple.
Try looking at it with od/hd or cut of a few Kbytes and load it into
emacs with hexl-mode.
You just have to remove a fixed-length header and a variable-length
part. The remaining is a file with fixed-length records.

I have a the opposit of what you want:
a perl-script, that   reads  a structure-definition  and  huge,  maybe
compressed, files and builds  a dbase-III+ file  from it, which may be
compressed/gzipped.

Tell me, if you want a copy of it.

Michael
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------
| lipka@lip.hanse.de | lipka@wavehh.hanse.de | lipka@uwesa.hanse.de
-------------------------------------------------------------------
famous last words:
"What a cable is this?" (unknown electrician)
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
| lipka@lip.hanse.de | lipka@wavehh.hanse.de | lipka@uwesa.hanse.de
-------------------------------------------------------------------
famous last words: