$ hexdump -C foo.txt 00000000 46 6f 6f 0d 42 61 72 0d 51 75 7a 0d |Foo.Bar.Quz.| 0000000c $ cat read.pl #!/usr/bin/env perl use warnings; use strict; use Data::Dumper; $Data::Dumper::Useqq=1; open my $fh, '<', 'foo.txt' or die $!; print Dumper([PerlIO::get_layers($fh)]) unless $] lt '5.008'; while (<$fh>) { print Dumper($_); } close $fh;