Hello, playing with pack and unpack I discoverd a strange and reproducable behaviour.
The following little code #!/usr/bin/perl $zerobuffer = chr(0) x 8192; print "zerobuffer: ", length($zerobuffer), "\n"; $test = "test.dat"; open (OUTPUT, ">$test" ) || die "Fehler open"; binmode OUTPUT; for ($rec=1; $rec<=500; $rec++) { print OUTPUT "$zerobuffer"; print "REC #$rec geschrieben\n" if ( ! ($rec % 100) ); } close (OUTPUT); needed about 15 seconds on my AlphaServer_800 with OpenVMS V8.3 and perl v5.8.6 . Changing the $zerobuffer to other characters than zero, the running time of this program on my machine lasted only 3 seconds. Is there a work around to speed up the program when writing character zero to disk? Thank you in advance, Joerg Begemann