For some reason, it reads and prints the entire thing even though I only tell it to print 1 byte!

Actually, you're telling it to read one byte at at time, until there's nothing left (read returns the number of bytes it succeeded in reading -- when there are none left, it will return 0, and your while loop will stop): 

while(read (TEST, $stuff, 1)) {

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...and then you're appending what you read during this pass onto what you've already read, until $text contains everything in the file: 

$text .= $stuff;

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....and then you're printing out the whole thing: 

print $text;

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If you only want to read 1 byte and then stop, you probably don't want to put it in a while loop.

Linda

In reply to Re: Reading input byte by byte by leira
in thread Reading input byte by byte by Anonymous Monk

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