Well, it needs to be made more clear in the docs, as I already said. The whole man entry for sysread says it deals with bytes. That's often not the case. Only a note at the very end of the entry even mentions multi-byte characters. If someone is expecting from the rest of the entry to read only bytes and misses that point, they'll be surprised to get multi-byte characters. If they are wanting to get characters and just skim the first part of the doc entry, it could seem the function won't do what they need. Compare it to the docs for read, which mention characters much earlier and more clearly.