Do you know about pack/unpack? They're Perl's way of converting a binary representation of a number, found in a string, from and to an actual numeric value. In addition, the format string they use offers so many options to specify the form of input data - almost like regexes - that you can parse simplistic binary file formats (without too much variation) very easily. Update: Huh - there was no reply visible on this node when I wrote mine..