Re: More on hex pack/unpack

[Corion]

Egads - httptech is right - BBQs file is truncated at the first 0x1A character. Maybe using binmode() would be a good idea. I always use binmode whenever I open binary files, even on operating systems that don't claim to need it...

(0x1A is ^Z (EOF) under DOS, Win32 and the like and messes up reading from binary files, that's why you need binmode() for those files.)

[Ovid]

Corion, ^Z does more than just mess up reading from binary files. Consider the following code (I know it's nonsense, but bear with me):

#/usr/bin/perl

use CGI;
my $query = new CGI;
print "Where did this line go?\n";

That code will work fine on linux, but in Active State Perl on my Windows box, that last line will never appear if I run it from the command line (admittedly, this might happen in all WinPerl versions). You can imagine my fun in debugging that.

What's going on is that when I instantiate a new CGI object, I have to enter name=value pairs in offline mode. Then I press ^Z to stop that. Nothing else prints until I print a newline! (I've tried $| = 1 to no avail).

Needless to say, this has made my life hell when I've debugged CGI scripts and forgotten about this little "feature".

Update: To make matters worse, this feature appears to be intermittant. Every once in a while, with no code changes, "Where did this line go?" will appear.