You are reading the file using a textfile-oriented function (I believe the buzzword is "starship operator" but I could have that wrong). If you instead use the read() function and specify a binary record size, you should get the results you're looking for. The following code snippet is designed to read a file upload from the CGI standard input device and write it to a local disk file, but it shows the technique enough for you to modify it to read from an actual disk-resident file.

      $inpfsz = 0; 
      open(RESFIL, ">$desfnm"); 
      binmode(RESFIL); 

      while ($inpcnt=read($srcfnm,$inpbuf,2096)) { 
            $inpfsz += $inpcnt; 
            print RESFIL $inpbuf; 
      } 

      close(RESFIL);
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- Steven K. Mariner Perl Lover