A little-known recent Perl enhancement is the ability to read fixed-length records by setting $/ to a reference to an integer.

So, in your case, you'd say $/ = \1

However, you mention something about no more data being received, which leads me to believe you may be reading the data as it's being written, such as from a pipe or socket or something. If that's the case, you need to check into non-blocking IO. Check out perlipc and perlfaq8 for more info on such things.

*Woof*