$ perl -e 'open($fh,">:crlf:encoding(UTF-16BE)", "test.utf16"); print $fh "hello\n"'

$ xxd test.utf16
0000000: 0068 0065 006c 006c 006f 000d 0a         .h.e.l.l.o...

# that was bad -- odd number of bytes


$ perl -e 'open($fh,">:encoding(UTF-16BE):crlf", "test.utf16"); print $fh "hello\n"'

$ xxd test.utf16
0000000: 0068 0065 006c 006c 006f 000d 000a       .h.e.l.l.o....

# that was good.


$ perl -e 'open($fh,">:raw:encoding(UTF-16BE)", "test.utf16"); print $fh "hello\n"'

$ xxd test.utf16
0000000: 0068 0065 006c 006c 006f 000a            .h.e.l.l.o..

# also good (no CR, but who needs that anyway? ;)


$ perl -e 'open($fh,">:encoding(UTF-16BE):raw", "test.utf16"); print $fh "hello\n"'

$ xxd test.utf16
0000000: 6865 6c6c 6f0a                           hello.

# not what you want