Actually, newer versions of perl have broken the 'proper' behaviour of text mode on Win32. Relative to the system utilities anyway. Historically, ^Z was used to indicate the end of file in text files whose content failed to fill the last allocation block on disc on filesystems that didn't have room in their directory structures for a number to determine this information. And whilst the reason for using ^Z has fallen into history, the system utilities still honour this mechanism(*).

If you create a text file that contains a ^Z part way through:

C:\test>perl -wle"
    print 'the quick brown fox' for 1..3; 
    print chr( 26 ); 
    print 'secret message'
" > junk.txt
[download]

And then use a system utility to display it:

C:\test>type junk.txt
the quick brown fox
the quick brown fox
the quick brown fox
[download]

The system utitlties stop reading when they encounter the ^Z, just like in days of yore.

Perl used to honour this in 5.6.1 days, but has since broken the behaviour:

C:\test>perl -pe1 junk.txt
the quick brown fox
the quick brown fox
the quick brown fox
→
secret message
[download]

translation to unicode entity the result of posting of course

Perl shouldn't read past a ^Z unless the file has been binmode'd. And yes, a consquence of this is that when reading unicode files, they should be read in binary mode.

I don't suppose that a 'bug' report for this would rate much attention. If the world has survived the 5(more?) years of 5.8.x without noticing this, then I don't expect much action to be taken now. But can you imagine the storm if Perl for *nix suddenly started to doing line-end translation unless you used binmode :)

(*)As a historical aside, when Mike Cowlishaw ported REXX to OS/2, he used this feature to good effect. The first time a REXX program was run, the 'compiled' binary bytecode was attached to the end of the file after the ^Z. On subsequent runs, if the bytecode was still there, it would be used rather than recompiling. As all the editors and system utilities used the MS CRT to read the files, whenever a file was copied or editied, the bytecode was transparently discarded and so it would be re-compiled whenever it was modified.