Thanks Guys

the header is on the first line of my file so I'm doing the following

perl -pe 's/(0-9{10})$/sprintf("%010d", $1-2)/e if $. ==1' TONYFILE.DAT

for some reason it's not changing the count...it's still 496

any idea what i'm missing here?

This outputs the new contents to the standard output. If you want to change the file, you have to add the -i flag:

perl -i~ -pe ...
[download]

لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ