Does the PERLIO environment variables (described in perlrun) help in this case?

In Perl 5.6 and some books the :raw layer (previously sometimes also referred to as a "discipline") is documented as the inverse of the :crlf layer. That is no longer the case - other layers which would alter binary nature of the stream are also disabled. If you want UNIX line endings on a platform that normally does CRLF translation, but still want UTF-8 or encoding defaults the appropriate thing to do is to add :perlio to PERLIO environment variable.

Running "set PERLIO=:perlio" seemed to work under XP

(Reponse well after original post)