Dear all. Thank you for your time and suggestions/questions/etc. I get the feeling that I wasn't able to formulate my question in an understandable and unique way, sorry about that. The suggestions are getting more and more complicated which wasn't what I was hoping for. In the end I just wanted perl to print a variable in a specific way :-) (like an output modifier for a numeric datatype where a "long" or whatever shouldn't be printed as one number but instead as a series of bytes in hex). I think I will stick with my suggestion in https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=11136245 which covers my use case, can be easily adapted from unsigned to signed should the need arise and which consists of code I understand today and probably in 2 years as well :-) Thanks!