Thanks everyone for your comments and schooling me in *nix. Since the source example I was given was bash using "$*" as a reference to the data structure instead of $1, I assumed they really wanted me to interpret all arguments sent to the program as a single string for parsing.

Many of you are correct in saying that the picture I gave was unclear and probably had more to do with bash and proper argument passing technique than either C or Perl. For this I am sorry.

As it turns out, the contents can be binary in nature but I have been told that the entirety of the data structure will be passed as the first argument. I will be able to parse the C structure fields out of $ARGV[0].

Thanks again all for helping give me the correct questions to ask to pin then down.