From: Jeff de Vries <jdevries@...>
Date: 2002-11-23T07:09:01+09:00
Subject: Reading and writing binary data from files

I just started reading about Ruby, and decided to try to use it to write 
a utility I need.  One of the things that I need to do is to read a file 
that contains binary data (32-bit integers, and strings consisting of a 
16-bit integer count followed by that many 8-bit chars) created from a C 
program.  Poking around, I saw the sysread and syswrite calls, which 
appear to let me read 4 bytes (for a 32-bit integer, for example) into a 
string.  The question is, short of picking each byte off one-by-one and 
doing the shift-add thing to build up an integer, can I just say 
"reinterpret this memory as an integer"?  I also need to go the other 
way, writing out binary 32-bit integers.

Thanks!
Jeff