what's the standard byte order?

There isn't one.

You're either using your local machine's byte order (which happens to be big-endian) or you're using big-endian explicitly.

The question was whether you want to use the local machine's byte order (whatever it might be) or to use big-endian explicitly.

I also want to look into "Math::BigInt" - I've never heard of this: is it a library of Perl functions?

Math::BigInt

In reply to Re^5: reading packed unsigned long long by ikegami
in thread reading packed unsigned long long by Spooky

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