You should use binmode() on your input and output. This might explain your problem. I'd also not read "a line at a time" since during decryption the line endings will be encrypted. No other errors pop out at me so give that a try.

You can tell you converted this from C code. Perl will let you xor entire strings so you could make this faster and simpler, something like: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

if(@ARGV < 3) {
    print "Usage: $0 <key> <input file> <output file>\n";
    exit(0);
}

my $key = $ARGV[0];
open(IN, $ARGV[1]) or die "Can't read $ARGV[1]: $!\n";
open(OUT, ">$ARGV[2]") or die "Can't wrote $ARGV[2]: $!\n";
binmode(IN); binmode(OUT);

my $in;
while( sysread(IN,$in,length($key)) ) {
    print OUT $in^substr($key,0,length($in));
}

close(IN);
close(OUT);

[download]

I tested this and it works for me.

Update: I tested your code under Win98 and the first part of the file decrypted properly and then it fell apart. Looking at the encrypted file I find that the description fell apart at the first character that got encrypted into a newline. So I may have actually diagnosed the problem correctly.

Also, interestingly enough, when I was in college and worked for their computer department, I helped investigate some cracking that a student was doing. The student had encrypted the source code to their tools using something very much like this. They didn't keep the encrypt/decrypt source code on their account. So working with just the contents of some files, I was able to decrypt their files using fairly simple techniques. So don't consider this simple xoring as other than a very insecure obscuring and not really encrypting.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye"

In reply to (tye)Re: xor encrypt-decrypt routine by tye
in thread xor encrypt-decrypt routine by j0e

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