To be honest, I was not trying to compress the file to save space so much as I was trying to compress it into a sort of "e-book reader" style format so that I could do the other half of this problem, to write the "reader" app. I am thinking of this for an iPAQ running Linux with small storage space.

That said, I understand the use of Compress:: but want to solve the real problem here, how to write binary data to a file.

Let's say I have an integer, $i, that is less than 256. The answer is simple:

printf "%c", $i;
[download]

But what about an integer with a value of, say, 16503. Obviously, the above code would not work.

How would I get this to the file?

Ed