I had the same fear, probably derived from some convincement that "Perl is for text". I then had many occasions to be more than happy with Perl's abilities to treat binary data. And, by the way, one involved some RADIUS message exchange!
Hey! Up to Dec 16, 2007 I was named frodo72, take note of the change! Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<<ti.xittelop@oivalf