I was intrigued by the question and had a go at trying to do it. I often find myself using a hex dump utility to 'see what's actually there'. Looking in Perl would be useful. I've not had experience with binary mode before so it was about time I did.
(dummy.txt has 99 'a's and a 'b') 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Fcntl;

my $stream;

# 'or die ...' removed for clarity

sysopen(DUMMY, "dummy.txt", O_RDWR | O_BINARY);
my $bytes_read = read DUMMY, $stream, 128;

for ( my $i=0; $i<= $bytes_read; $i++ ){
  my $char = substr( $stream, $i, 1 );
  print $i, ": ", ord( $char ), " => *", $char, "*\n";
}

[download]
produces... 
0: 97 => *a*
1: 97 => *a*
2: 97 => *a*
3: 97 => *a*
... etc
98: 97 => *a*
99: 98 => *b*
100: 0 => **

[download]
Nowhere near it (not even new lines). I found the docs quite intimidating, clearly the cross platform issues are tricky. (I was reading one article that mentioned CP/M!)
Any pointers?
activestate 5.8 on winXP

In reply to Re^3: Deleting EOF from a file by wfsp
in thread Deleting EOF from a file by nsyed

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