You didn't actually show the version of the code that produced the "spaced-out" listing of the data, and it's not really clear what you meant, exactly, when you said:
I tried adding an offset of 5 thinking it will skip the first portion of it...
In what sense (using what changes to the original code) did you "add an offset of 5"? You seem to be getting 5 spaces between each character, or perhaps it's 5 null bytes between each character. (I think the "Command-prompt" windows on MS systems tend to show a space whenever the "text" being displayed has a null byte.)

Anyway, as inidicated in the first reply, if you only want to see one byte of output, don't use "while (...)" to go through the whole file. On the other hand, if you want to go through the whole file, but you want to do something distinctly with each byte, do that thing inside the while loop, and don't bother concatenating all the bytes back together into a single scalar string. For example, if you just wanted to print one byte per line: 

while ( read( TEST, $stuff, 1 )) {
    print $stuff,"\n";
}

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

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