Cross-platform scripts

I've heard back from one or two people who've run the lsevt.pl, lsreg.pl, and regp.pl scripts I posted a bit ago. For the most part, I've heard pretty positive comments...things have worked well for most folks. The scripts seem to work just fine so far, regardless of the operating system they're run on...as long as it's running on an x86 processor. Yep, you guessed it...endianness is an issue.

However, one astute user was running the scripts on a G5 (PPC processor) and let me know that if you change the arguments of the unpack() function, the scripts work just fine, regardless of which microprocessor they're run on. The change comes in replacing all of the "S" (short, WORD, 2 bytes) and "L" (long, DWORD, 4 bytes) with "v" and "V", respectively. So, take the regp.pl script for example...in the _getNodeType() subroutine, you'll see:

return unpack("S",$record);

Change that to:

return unpack("v", $record);

In the readNkRecord() subroutine, you'll find:

my (@recs) = unpack("SSL3LLLLLLLLLL4LSS",$record);

Change that to:

my (@recs) = unpack("vvV3VVVVVVVVVV4Vvv",$record);

I won't be making these changes to the scripts myself...at least not right away. However, I am working on another book, so I will include those changes in the scripts before I add them to the CD.