Hello Gentlemen, thank you for the tips that reached me online and offline. Some were about using perl / perl- based database and some about reading direcly in AS. As I do not know much about perl and it seems to be a new world for me I currently prefer a solution based on plain AS. As seen in the Standard Additions the "read" command can start from an absolute position given to it as an integer. Therefore the byte address within the file is limited to "MaxInt" (Max_imum Int_eger as it was called in Pascal - my first love) If integers are 16 bit in AS then the file size is limited to 65.536 bytes which is too small. If integers are 32 bit in AS then the file size is limited to 4.294.967.296 bytes and is for sure big enough. Unfortuntely I found no source about the internal representation of integers in AS. Could please anybody be as kind as telling me how big "MaxInt" in AS is?? Best Wishes Franz