How would I read the file other than into an array?

You can read the entire file into a scalar using the following snippet:

my $raw_data; { local $/; $raw_data = <FH>; }
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Is there a way to access it a bit at a time?

Yes, using read.

You can set $/ to a reference to a literal number. Then the file will be read in chunks of that size.

{
    local $/ = \1024;
    while (<$fh>) {
        # do things with 1k chunks in $_
    }
}
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