note jeroenes Other monks learned me how to doo this some while ago. A bit confused though whether you are trying to read/write binary or a text file populated with hexidecimal characters. 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: <code>my $rec; do_something( $rec) while read(FILE, $rec,$reclength);</code> With un[pack] you can translate both binary and hexidecimal data: <code>@hd = unpack 'h*', $rec; @floats = unpack 'f*', $rec;</code> 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. 121277 121277