msg /StartBE        (#  &#9492;żj</
(more or less, the └ in the code tags was replaced by its HTML equivalent, &#9492;)

Not very useful in determining what the pack function is trying to do. It looks like line noise, so did the pack fail? Is the format wrong? I dunno.

But I'll also mention that pack and unpack still confuse me, even though I know the surrounding Perl syntax in that function. And even after reading most of perldoc -f pack and perldoc perlpacktut.