(Not sure if I'm telling you anything new -- just in case...)

Actually I stumbled into this issue when wanting to prepare a minimal example for a clpmisc post, and then I didn't think of it, so I eventually did something different. After having posted I did test with a separate binmode, but didn't include reference to it here because I wanted to stay concise (which is not a quality of mine!)

Anyway, I agree that this is kinda weird.

Indeed, I do not actually have a problem. I'm only puzzled by this behaviour: in some sense, it would make more sense if it didn't work with binmode either, don't you think so?