Um, in your first attempt, it looks like you forgot to do "binmode STDOUT"?

And in the code you showed for trying merlyn's suggestion, it looks like you're printing the content header after printing the file (and you're not even doing "binmode" on the input, let alone on STDOUT).

Was that just a flaky copy/paste into the post?

update: Sorry, I'm probably missing the point completely here. In the first snippet, it's unclear to me why zentara (the original author) would do binmode on input and not on output -- I assumed that if you need binmode at all, you need it on both. As for the second snippet, merlyn was apparently assuming a OS environment where binmode was not necessary at all, and was using CGI.pm's functions for doing the content headers, boundaries, etc (so you shouldn't have been printing a header after that loop).