Well, yeah, but that's for the sake of portability with OSen that
do make the distinction between text and binary.
Unix (and Linux) make no such distinction. Also, his data is good 'ol 7-bit ASCII. Why should he have difficulty reading that regardless of binmode? And why should setting LANG to 'C' address the problem? (I've tested it. It does.)
It's a bug. It's either a Perl bug in 5.8.0 or a bug in Red Hat's implementation on RHEL3. They have stepped up to fix this in U3. I've tested the patch that fixes the problem.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." - Will Rogers