Your method seems fine to me, but writing in general can be done just using the print command, whether or not your strings are binary. On win32 you do need the binmode command, though.

For reading you could also use this to fetch fixed-length records:

my $rec;
do_something( $rec) while read(FILE, $rec,$reclength);
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With unpack you can translate both binary and hexidecimal data:

@hd = unpack 'h*', $rec;
@floats = unpack 'f*', $rec;
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So the exact name of what you are trying to do? Reading binary files, unpacking ....

I will have a look into that Data:Hexdump module. It's probably worth it.

Mehopes it's all a bit clearer to you now.

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)

Update: I've read the HexDump docs, and what it does is just to make a binary file ready for human reading like in a hex viewer. So it's very usable to dump a bin file on a tty, but not fit to parse a binary file for subsequent use in a script. See the code above.