True, it depends on the characteristics of inet_aton(3) however using pack() and split() only works if the IP address is in the dotted quad format while inet_aton() will work with any valid IP address and return undef if the address is not valid.

In reply to Re^3: Sorting log files with IP addresses (duplicates) by jwkrahn
in thread Sorting log files with IP addresses (duplicates) by Secode

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