Mark Bixby and other experienced perl programmers on the list could have
done this in a flash, but it took me a couple of hours to figure it out.
In case someone might benefit from this, here's how I did it:

---<code begin>---

# to replace the non printable characters in a file...(with spaces)

$filename = "/AIH/TEMPDATA/PMFEXT";
$fileout = "/AIH/TEMPDATA/PMFEXT2";
open(OUT, ">$fileout");
open(IN, "<$filename");

$_ = <IN>;               #read the first line
s/[^[:print:]]/ /g;
print OUT "$_";

while(<IN>) {               #loop as long as not EOF
s/[^[:print:]]/ /g;
print OUT "$_";
}

---<code end>---

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