SPUG: binary data with the high bit set

[Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 12:07:57PM -0600, jlb wrote:
> ah, binmode fixed it.  d'oh.
> 
> I never thought you had to use that under non-windows OSes, but I suppose 
> it's a good habit to be in anyway.

Welcome to a brave new unicode world, where binmode does make a
difference if you have a utf8 locale set (as is the default with
RedHat 8 and up, for instance).  This change (perl automatically
outputing utf8 given a utf8 locale for non-binary filehandles) was
actually enough trouble that it was removed in 5.8.1 and has to be
explicitly requested via the new (repurposed) -C switch.

See http://search.cpan.org/perldoc/perl581delta.pod for details.