True. That would give him access to the native api's. If he knows which ones to call, what parameters to pass, how to manipulate perl vars into their C counterparts and back again, that would work.

Seems a lot of work to avoid typing local $/=\4096 or whatever buffersize he is comfortable with.

I'd also be wary of doing anything complicated given dada's warning:

this simplicistic approach doesn't by any mean address any issue, and leave a lot of work on the programmers side; you have to pack() and unpack() data as C wants it, you have to know the structures you're using, and so on. it's not recommended to use Win32::API for complex tasks; think about writing an XS extension for that.