Try this:

open IN, "out.txt" or die "Can't open out.txt for reading, Perl says $
+!";
print "Want ", (-s IN), "\n";
binmode IN;
{
    local $/;  # undef $/ so we read the whole file in
    $data = <IN>;
}
print "Got ", length $data;
[download]

This will work fine. binmode() is required when dealing with binary files on Win32 to supress Perl's automagical line ending conversion. Typically you would use read() in a while() loop to grap a chunk of bytes to process. If you just want the whole file it is easier to just grab it as shown. Note that read() will not always reliably give you X bytes when you ask for X bytes...

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print