G'day BigHoss,

Welcome to the monastery.

You've written 'the "read()" of the file cannot be changed.' and then, in your code, you've shown what happens when you do change it. So, please clarify what you mean; I can provide a few suggestions but, until that ambiguity is sorted out, I'm really just guessing.

The error you're getting is described in perldiag.

Reading the entire file and then looping through the output from split can be achieved more simply with code like this:

while (my $l = <INFILE>) {
    chomp $l;
    print $l;
}
[download]

You'll probably find that passing a lexical filehandle (see open) to BigParse() is easier than dealing with globrefs.

Check the read documentation and man wc for discrepancies between what each considers a character and a byte to be.

sysopen and sysread may be better options for dealing with your binary data.