I have the need to stored username/password information. Obviously, I want to keep this information private, so I thought that I would just write the data to a binary file and then, when needed, read it and use it. I thought I could just use pack and binmode to do this. Something along the lines of 
print "Enter User:\n";
$luser=<STDIN>;

print "Enter Pass:\n";
$pass=<STDIN>;

$luser=pack("A*",$luser);
$pass=pack("A*",$pass);

open (PFILE,">pass.bin") or die ("unable to open file $!\n");
binmode PFILE;
print PFILE "$luser|$pass";
close PFIFLE;

[download]

However, doing this, or every variation I have come up with, produces either a file that contains "my_user|my_pass" or simply "null|null".
Then reading it... 
open (PFILE,"pass.bin") or die ("unable to open file $!\n");
binmode PFILE;
while ($line=<PFILE>){
$line=unpack("A*",$line);
}

[download]
Of course, reading doesn't work since I am not getting the correct data in the file.

I assume that I am either misunderstanding pack, misusing pack, or taking the wrong approach altogether.
Any thoughts of how to fix this approach or a better approach altogeter?

In reply to ascii to binary by ctaustin

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