note afoken <blockquote>I was wondering if "." could change in some way the content of the two buffers. Since it's string concatenation operator, I was worried that some sort of "stringification" of the two buffers could change them some way (this is why I asked if there's a way to concat two binary buffers). I am still not sure about this. </blockquote> <p>Perl's strings are "8-bit-clean". You can store binary data in them, and you can use all string operators on them, even if <i>you</i> consider your data binary. Stringification does not happen here, because for Perl, the data is already a string.</p> <blockquote>Regarding the size of the read data: I am actually trying to put back together some stripes from a dead raid array, so if I am not able to read exactly $bufsize bytes I'd better die away asap :) </blockquote> <p>Consider using <c>dd conv=noerror</c>, [http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/|dd_rescue] or [http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html|ddrescue] instead of Perl. If you care about your data, don't touch it and pay experts to rescue the data.</p> <p>Alexander</p> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-747201"> --<br> Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-) </div></div> 1003666 1003759