Thanks for the pointer, I wasn't aware of that one. I've found that using perlio in place of crlf allows the 2nd solution (using \015\012 ) to now be possible, though I'd rather not have to use raw octals if it can be avoided...

when I get the problem layers are - "unix crlf encoding(UTF-16LE) utf8"
when I set set PERLIO=perlio layers are "unix perlio encoding(UTF-16LE) utf8" , and 0D is correctly followed by 00 when using raw octals, \015\012 .