it seems that heavens have listened to my prayers! at least half of them, anyway... in perl 5.10.0 there's a new modifier for pack/unpack that allows one to force big- or little-endian explicitly. means that i could solve signed short part of the problem. no bright idea what to do with bit strings, though. and that's 5.10.0... *sigh*
Comment on Re: yet another "reading binary data" question
I did recall correctly (in my response above), you can get ActivePerl 5.10 and 5.8 for Solaris. Whether it will work with the version you've got, and how invasive the install is, I don't know. But it may be worth checking out.