 
You want to read a NUL-terminated string from a file, starting at a particular address.
Ensure you're working with a binary file, set $/ to an ASCII NUL, and read the string with <>:
binmode(FH); # binary mode $old_rs = $/; # save old $/ $/ = "\0"; # ASCII 0: NUL seek(FH, $addr, SEEK_SET) or die "Seek error: $!\n"; $string = <FH>; # read string chomp $string; # remove NUL $/ = $old_rs; # restore old $/
You can use local to save and restore $/:
{
    local $/ = "\0";
    # ...
}                           # $/ is automatically restoredThe example program shown in Example 8-5, bgets, accepts a filename and one or more byte addresses as arguments. Decimal, octal, or hexadecimal addresses may be specified. For each address, the program reads and prints the null- or EOF-terminated string at that position.
  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  # bgets - get a string from an address in a binary file
  use IO::Seekable;
  use open IO => ":raw";              # binary mode on all opened handles
  ($file, @addrs) = @ARGV             or die "usage: $0 file addr ...";
  open(FH, $file)                     or die "cannot open $file: $!";
  $/ = "\000";
  foreach $addr (@addrs) {
      $addr = oct $addr if $addr =~ /^0/;
      seek(FH, $addr, SEEK_SET)
          or die "can't seek to $addr in $file: $!";
      printf qq{%#x %#o %d "%s"\n}, $addr, $addr, $addr, scalar <>;
  }Example 8-6 is a simple implementation of the Unix strings program.
  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
  # strings - pull strings out of a binary file
  $/ = "\0";
  use open IO => ":raw";
  while (<>) {
      while (/([\040-\176\s]{4,})/g) {
          print $1, "\n";
      }
  }The PerlIO(3) manpage; the seek, getc, and ord functions in perlfunc(1) and in Chapter 29 of Programming Perl; the discussion of qq// in the "Quote and Quote-Like Operators" section of the perlop(1) manpage, and in the "Pick Your Own Quotes" section of Chapter 2 of Programming Perl
 
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