HI from another former FORTRAN programmer.

EQUIVALENCE was really great when you had a language that couldn't directly convert types worth anything, but you've got Perl, and it can manage this way better and simpler.

You do indeed want to use unpack for this one. I'm guessing that your fixed-length data is in some binary format rather than in ASCII. unpack will let you take that in chunks and convert it - it's very like a FORMAT statement in that regard. However, it's a good bit more powerful, as it lets you have a lot of control as to how you want to manipulate the data.

Take a look at unpack and pack for the lowdown on what you can do - it's quite a lot. I'm certain your need will be met.