Thank you for the response. The fourth paragraph of my initial post explains why I'm using binmode rather than this solution.

Your additional notes are good advice, but I omitted error checking, etc., from my example because I simplified my code to include only the relevant bits. I apologize for not stating this explicitly; I wrongly presumed it was clear from constructions like if 1 that are pointless in production code. (In practice I use autodie to avoid having to individually check every open with identical logic or to write my own open wrapper.)