Man, that looks like a great way to put it! BUT, since I'm a very stuborn person, I'm going to keep trying to learn what the hell unpack is all about before I finaly give up and cut/paste your suggestion (which I more or less understand). Is there any particular reason why you suggested uuencode/uudecode over pack/unpack, or would you just prefer to do it that way?

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!