hi i have a huge xml file that i must work with. right now the file is only 1 line that contains about 2 million characters which represent 30,000 records. there are no carriage returns or linefeeds whatsoever. what i need to do is make each record on its own line. new records begin with "" and end with "". i've been looking around here and it seems the tools to use are: sed, tr or awk but i'm not sure which is most appropriate. i've tried this to no avail: tr '<ROW' '\012 <ROW' <source.xml |tee destination.xml above seems to output some pretty weird stuff so i must be way off here. maybe its that "<" character that is the problem?