My questions: is this a bugette, a feature, or am I having a senior moment?

Most likely all of them. A is ASCII, and probably doesn't honour control chars at end of string, i.e. the C string terminator \0 - bug?.

update: Try with my $string   = qq{abc\cL};

perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'

In reply to Re: Problem with pack/unpack asymmetry by shmem
in thread Problem with pack/unpack asymmetry by johngg

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