Incidentally under *NIX there's not strictly speaking anything like "text mode".

Update: I didn't want to test this myself, but in the end I did and it seems to work just fine:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $fh, '<', '/proc/stat' or die $!;
{
    print scalar <$fh>;
    seek $fh, 0, 0;
    sleep 1;
    redo;
}
__END__
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