Once you go to BINMODE on a file handle, a record separator makes no sense.

I think I understand where you're coming from: when reading a binary file, it often makes more sense to use read instead of readline (aka <>), and I personally would probably use the former.

However, I also see several incorrect statements mixed in your nodes, like "Use of the DATA file handle is "special". Your initial premise that you could read binary data from the DATA file handle is wrong. That data will be in a character format." - this is wrong, see my node here.

I guess bottom line: Don't use <> bracket when reading binary files!

DATA is just another filehandle, and readline is not that magical, it can be used to read any filehandle (whether DATA, a binary file, etc.), as long as you pay attention to $/. For example, you can set $/ to a reference to an integer, and then readline will read "records" from the file, very much like read does.

Update:

print "this is Windows machine and I don't see both CR and LF characte
+rs\n";
print "but I think that is due to Perl translation of line endings\n";

[download]

binmode turns off the CRLF to LF conversion, so if you're not seeing CRLF line endings (not sure how you determined that?) then that means the source file has only LF instead of CRLF line endings. Update 2: Hmm, see replies.

Minor edits for clarity.

In reply to Re^6: Error binmode() on unopened filehandle by haukex
in thread Error binmode() on unopened filehandle by RedJeep

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