Answers to questions:

• If you don't know what to expect in return, unpack's not the right function for the job.
• No. A file (whether binary or text) is just a stream of bytes. Text files are said to be stored line-by-line because, in certain places, they have specific characters. $/ is also known as the Input Record Separator because it contains that special character -- usually a newline. The I/O routines read a chunk of bytes from a file and split it up based on the presence of whatever's in $/. That happens to default to \n. In a binary file, there are no lines.
• It's a nice power of two, and it fits nicely across the screen. No real technical reason of which I'm aware.
• Nope.
• Low-level I/O handling routine documentation, probably.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.