Actually, you're telling it to read one byte at at time, until there's nothing left (read returns the number of bytes it succeeded in reading -- when there are none left, it will return 0, and your while loop will stop):

while(read (TEST, $stuff, 1)) {
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...and then you're appending what you read during this pass onto what you've already read, until $text contains everything in the file:

$text .= $stuff;
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....and then you're printing out the whole thing:

print $text;
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If you only want to read 1 byte and then stop, you probably don't want to put it in a while loop.

Linda