> As I understand the theory (compile .class files instead of .java files) 
> this is fine with me. However, being curious about the portability of 
> the awk expression, I tried it on solaris, there with both awk and nawk, 
> printf "%c",0; prints nothing at all, so all those 00 above do not end 
> up in the output. Needs another method to convert text to binary.

We can emit them as FF, and then use "tr" to convert them to NULs.  This 
ought to work.

Paolo