* An ongoing debate between Maurice Kinal and Ben Ritchey rages on ...   
      
    MK>   echo "2 68 38 393 261 0 0" | \   
    MK>     perl -e 'while(<>){@myarray = split(/ +/, $_);};\   
    MK>              print pack("S*", @myarray);' > partial.msg   
    MK>   echo -ne "AREA:TUXPOWER\x0d" >> partial.msg   
    MK>   echo -ne "\x01Stinkin'_kludges\0xd" >> partial.msg   
      
   *** CORRECTION: I re-typed all the above in a script and ran it, voila'! Like   
   a charm ;-) Must've had a typo :(   
      
    MK> If all the above works then it should be extremely doable to write   
    MK> a script to handle this particular issue.  Let me know if you're   
    MK> interested and we can pick it up from here.  Also if you have   
    MK> coreutils then we can exploit it's 'date' command to take care of   
    MK> the MSG DateTime variable.   
      
   Works for me, but my learning curve is very steep compared to yours {g}   
      
   --   
   Be well    :^)   
      
    : Ben  aka cMech  Web: http://cmech.dynip.com   
    :           Home page: http://users.lusfiber.net/~fido4cmech   
    :     Positronium BBS: telnet://cmech.dynip.com   
    :   
    +    WildCat! Board 24/7  +1-337-984-4794  any BAUD 8,N,1   
   --- GoldED+/W32-MINGW   
    * Origin: FIDONet - The Positronium Repository (1:393/68)