My last example was without the special DATA file handle and shows that my $binary = <$fh> will read the data from $fh up to and including the first appearance of $/. Using binmode on a file handle does not change this behaviour.

You may check if:

• your data really does not contain a record separator
• the generated base64 data, when decoded, resembles the original file

EDIT: Here is another:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use constant RANDFILE => "rand.dat";

system "dd if=/dev/urandom of=" . RANDFILE . " bs=1k count=64";
open my $fh, '<', RANDFILE or die;
binmode $fh;
my $binary = <$fh>;

print "got: ", length($binary), "\n";
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