Firstly, I must 'fess up. I don't know Perl. I'm needing to move a large Perl application to a small embedded system and it needs to go on a serious diet. The application has many 10's of MB of computer generated data files that contain text like this: 
%my_flds =
(
   "DIS"  => [ 0, 33,  1, 0x0000000200000000, 0x00, 1, 0x0000000000000
+000, "" ],
   "L2"   => [ 1, 24,  8, 0x00000000FF000000, 0x00, 1, 0x0000000000000
+000, "" ],
   "L1"   => [ 2, 16,  8, 0x0000000000FF0000, 0x00, 1, 0x0000000000000
+000, "" ],
   "L0"   => [ 3, 15,  1, 0x0000000000008000, 0x00, 0, 0x0000000000000
+000, "" ],
   "LDIS" => [ 4, 14,  1, 0x0000000000004000, 0x00, 1, 0x0000000000000
+000, "" ],
   "LCNT" => [ 5, 13,  1, 0x0000000000002000, 0x00, 1, 0x0000000000000
+000, "" ],
);

%my_def =
( NAME    => "CONFIG",
  ADDRESS => 0x400000,
  LENGTH  => 64,
  FLAGS   => 0x001,
  NOTE    => "",
  RESET   => 0x0000000000000000,
  FIELDS  => \%my_flds
);

[download]
Can this be packed down into a simple binary file? If so, how would I modify the app to read this binary file? Are there any other strategies you would recommend for reducing the footprint of an application? Thanks, Matt.

In reply to Reducing application footprint: large text files by Anonymous Monk

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