How are you determining that the Word file contains "extra junk"? Are you opening it with Word or just looking at in a text editor. I'm wondering if you're interpreting perfectly valid binary data in the Word file as "extra junk."

For what's worth it seems unlikely that binmode() will help. It's a rare Unix that can't write binary data to disk without help. You're not running Redhat 8.0, are you?

-sam