I use STDIN for command line filters of "catable files" (text), eg. cat or "type" in the Windows world can display those files. I stand corrected about use of a binary file for such a purpose.

I am curious as to what "*_" means? I couldn't find that in my reference books.

The kind of binary files I usually deal with might have an odd number of bytes and I have to fix it up in the final result with either 16 bit aligned or 32 bit aligned values. Sometimes that means shifting things over a byte or more, So something like:
my $n_bytes = read(INBIN, $buff, $BUFSIZE); is the ticket. Your mileage may vary as they say! I haven't written any really hairy binary stuff in Perl.

In reply to Re^3: Mysteries of unpack("a", ...) by Marshall
in thread Mysteries of unpack("a", ...) by pspinler

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