note bart <blockquote><i>I read a lot of messages on here already on packing and unpacking on how everyone else is having problems understanding it as well. Does anyone have a good analogy or scenario on why it's used and how it works?</i></blockquote> There's a tutorial doc on pack/unpack that may even come with newer versions of Perl: [http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perlpacktut.html|perlpacktut] 223573 223573