If you want to copy Word files manually, you'll have to remember that these are binary files. Thus,

• Use binmode on your filehandles to ensure that Windows won't break the document by "fixing" newline symbols.
• Newlines in binary documents don't usually represent newlines in their contents, so it may be useful to use read, not readline (which is the synonym for <>).
• Don't modify data you're copying in any ways unless you know what you're doing ("$_\n" is not a good thing in case of binary files).