Thanks for the snippet. Yes that is an option I am exploring as well. Since I don't have a production grade binary yet (application is still being developed) I only have a binary file with 5 records (so can't test the performance benefit).
What I am doing is creating a separate parsing subroutine which would expect one record at a time for parsing, so how I read is independent of parsing. I am putting a user defined choice at run time if the user wants to read the binary in slurp mode or byte mode. This is what I have for slurp mode: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Fcntl qw(:seek);
use Data::Dumper; 

open my $fh, '<', 'Test.NEW' or die "File not found: $!";

binmode($fh);

my $data = do{ undef $/; <$fh> };
my @data = split /(?=3d3d)/, unpack ('H*',$data); 

for my $xdr (@data) {
    open (my $fh1, '<', \$xdr);          # create a filehandle from sc
+alar
    read ($fh1, my $buffer, 2);           # read the eye catcher
    read ($fh1, $buffer, 2);                # read the length
    my $length = unpack 'n', $buffer; # identify the length in decimal
    seek $fh1, 0, 0;                           # reset the offset
    read ($fh1, $buffer, $length);      #read till the length to preve
+nt garbage bytes
    process($buffer);
}
#print Dumper \@data;

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In reply to Re^2: Reading binary file in perl having records of different length by jaypal
in thread Reading binary file in perl having records of different length by jaypal

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