buffer limit on pipe command

[ninguno]

i'm trying to chop the headerfile off of a bunch of images.
the image data is 524288 bytes, with the headers varying in size (usually around 5k).

the simple way to do it would be:
tail -c-524288 filename | cat >newfile

but, it ends up with a file that's about half as large as I want it to be, I'm assuming due to a buffer limit on the pipe.

Is there a better way to go about this, or how do I change the buffer limit on pipe (and is that safe to do?)

 

[irixfan]

The man page of tail states: "The tail command will only tail the last 256 Kbytes of a file regardless of its line count". May this be the problem? I would try to split the file by searching the end of the header/start of the image but do not know how to do it exactly. awk?