To elaborate slightly, in win32, lines are terminated with \r\n. So when perl, on win32, wants to read a line, it reads until it finds a \r\n pair and translates it to a \n when your script sees it. This is because \n in perl is a masical character that gets translated to whatever the appropiate EOL for that platform is. As the poster above noted, binmode changes this so you read exactly what is written.