This should be really simple, but, I did a db_dump from the Berkely DB database off my phone, and everything is encoded in hex values, strings that look like this: 87474703a2f2f3231362e3135352e3137342e38342f736572766c6574732f6d6d733f6d6 573736167652d69 I decoded some of it by hand, and it has the info I need. I just need a perl script to run over the dump file and convert ever two characters into their ascii equivalent, and since it's been awhile since I did any perl, I'm at a loss of how to do it. Note that there are spaces and newlines in this file (which are not encoded into hex), so the counting for every two characters has to start at the beginning of each hex string. Any ideas? Even a perl one-liner that I could use would work: cat native.dump | perl -nle '<something>'