I have used IMPORT about a trillion times and I don't know about '-' and '.'; however, I do know about ^, which you can use to ignore a line. So if you say have a file and you know the first record is some header data you can do this:
Code:
IMPORT ^.
REPEAT:
IMPORT real_data_goes_here.
There is no way I know of to do this from within the file itself, though, which I think is more what you meant. Presumably if you knew to put a special 'ignore me' character in the file, you would know to just not write it there in the first place?
Also, utilities like sed/awk are often your friend for this kind of thing.