There are places where embedded \000 characters will get you into trouble, but Perl can read and write such files without problems, since Perl uses counted strings.

Be warned though that passing such strings to anything like a system routine (like open() or -x), that take null-terminated strings as arguments, you will have problems or security holes.

If by "slurp it all in" you mean something like:

$/ = undef;
$_ = <>;
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Plain old line-based I/O will also treat nulls just like any other character that isn't (part of) a line terminatation -- lines containing nulls will be fully read and written.

Of course, sometimes it makes sense to use nulls as the input record separator:

# one way to replace nulls with newlines:
$/ = "\x00";
while (<>) {
   s/\x00/\n/;
   print;
}
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