Because java can be made to read byte level information from files, its possible to read any file so long as you know the byte encoding used for that file type. You would first need to take a look at the .pag and .dir files. Are they text "type" files? Or are they binary in nature? In which of these two ways are they "read" by PERL??? Once you know this you can proceed with creating methods that either read text files or read binary files according to the byte encoding structure used. You can even convert from binary to character encoding if you wish. I've listed a collection of fileread/write(textfiles) and dataread/write(any file) methods in response to THIS post in case you want to see code.

Let me know if this was usefull to you.

Regards,

Dsl