hi guys. i am a biologist and i haven't been programming in perl for a long time so my question may seem a little naive but i'm at a total loss and any help would be appreciated. i need a perl script to convert some binary files (.dcd if anyone knows what they are) to ascii or just extract the ascii that they contain. i tried plain read with no results. i searched the net and i only found this code : 
use warnings;
use strict;

@ARGV == 2 or die "usage: $0 in_filename out_filename\n";

# get first argument, i.e filename
my $in_filename = shift;
print "You chose input <$in_filename>\n";
my $out_filename = shift;
print "You chose output <$out_filename>\n";

#set infile to binary mode
open INFILE, '<:raw', $in_filename or die "can't open $in_filename: $!
+";

open OUTFILE, '>', $out_filename or die "can't open $out_filename: $!"
+;

# read 8 bytes at a time
$/ = \8;

while ( <INFILE> ) {
print OUTFILE join( ', ', map sprintf( '0x%04x', $_ ), unpack 'S*', $_
+ ), "\n";
}

[download]
but when i run it it comes out with four columns of something seeming like hexadecimal (0xe15d ...). The dcd files are about 700 mb so i can't upload it for you to see it, but i managed to cut the first 80kb of it with hexedit and i upload it here: http://www.gigasize.com/get.php?d=7qfs5f331bf Does anyone have any idea or some plain guidelines because i really need get it done for my work. Thanks anyway!

In reply to binary to ascii convertion by pytheas

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