I have a serial system (9600 baud) that uses simple "packets" of information such as node address, function ,address, data, checksum. I can monitor them with a terminal program but would like something to help interpret them - put them one to a line, time stamp them, and possibly decode the fields into more human readable form. I am thinking of writing something in perl. I am a newbie and am wanting to learn. I haven't found anything like this. Any pointers, especially to code to give me ideas how to write this?