Loading Fixed Length ASCII / EBCDIC

Thanks to everyone who responded to my earlier questions...now I have some new ones... Importing ASCII Files I am able to convert and load from Delimited Ascii, and DBF files via 4gl and Perl... but I am having a lot of difficulty with Fixed Length and EBCDIC Files. Has anyone solved this? How? Is there some common utility for this that I am not seeing? One more thing Is there an *easy* way to save a variable to a file? As I am trying to write the code for the above, I was trying to create an Awk statement for use with the RUN command. The variable cAwk in my code is about 250 bytes long, so I cannot display it on screen. I would like to be able to store the variable in a text file so I can take a look at it and see where the bugs are. Do I have to OUTPUT TO REPORT to do this? TIA John Cokos