@JapanIsShinto: I've been in your boat today wearing your shoes.

I recently upgraded Perl and now some of the scripts that I've been running have been dying with the dreaded "Wide character in syswrite at blahblah.pl line nnnn." message.

In one particular case I was using LWP::Simple's get() method to retrieve an image (note: an image is binary data) and write it to disk. Previously this was working with...

my $content = get($url);
# other stuff...
die "Could not write: $filename\n$!" unless open(my $fdOut, '>', $file
+name);
binmode($fdOut);
syswrite($fdOut, $content, length($content));
close($fdOut);
[download]

Oh so simple and oh so effective. Enter Unicode... grumble.

Contrary to all the comments I can see on this thread... sometimes a string of bytes is just a string of bytes. Neither Perl nor anything else should be trying to interpret it as a string of characters. In the end, the solution was using Encode::_utf8_off() like the following...

use Encoding;

my $content = get($url);
Encode::_utf8_off($content);
# other stuff...
die "Could not write: $filename\n$!" unless open(my $fdOut, '>', $file
+name);
binmode($fdOut);
syswrite($fdOut, $content, length($content));
close($fdOut);
[download]

Hope this helps...