in reply to converting big hex to dec

Whatever, I wouldn't call another perl instance just to do a calculation. You know that pragmas like bigint import semantincs into block scopes, don't you?
$ perl -le '{use bigint; print 2**96} print 2**96' 79228162514264337593543950336 7.92281625142643e+28
I hope that someone will give you a more appropriate answer though...