Re^3: Deleting EOF from a file

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

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Re^4: Deleting EOF from a file by graff (Chancellor) on Jul 17, 2004 at 15:18 UTC
How did you create "dummy.txt"? I haven't been keeping up with all the hidden details of recent MS Windows versions -- it may well be that the practice of appending ^Z to mark EOF on text-mode files has been abandoned. I happened to try creating a small text file using Notepad on an XP system just now, and I found that there was no ^Z at the end. But I do recall seeing text files created on MS systems in the mid-90's that had been transfered (using binary-mode ftp) to a unix system, and there was a ^Z at the end of each file.	[reply]
Re^5: Deleting EOF from a file by wfsp (Abbot) on Jul 17, 2004 at 16:06 UTC
Thanks for your reply. ...it may well be the practice of appending ^Z to mark EOF on text-mode files has been abandoned. I've come to that conclusion too. I'm still rooting around on Google to learn how Windows marks EOF in text files. I now have a little hex dump script so it would be useful to know. Thanks again.	[reply]