Okay, I'm starting to see what you're talking about now. For example, if I set binmode($stdin, ':utf8'); to correspond with my construct of creating a new IO::Handle, it works.

I'm also understanding STDIN->getc(), I think I was trying to use STDIN->can("getc") in its place before.

It's all starting to make a little bit of sense to me now. They are doing the same thing, with almost the same code, only I can use the global(?) STDIN filehandle instead of creating a new one.

I've removed the unnecessary creation of a new IO::Handle and fdopen, and am just using STDIN like you suggested. Everything is working like I wanted and is much cleaner now.

Thanks!