pipe and binary i/o

I often want to use "pipe" with "readBin" to read (binary) data from the
standard output of a Perl or C program. For that I need "pipe" to work with
the "open='rb'" option. It never worked for me, and after a look at the
connections.c file, I see that in "pipe_open" the mode gets passed directly
to "popen" (I'm using Linux on an Intel machine). Popen doesn't know "rb"
and fails. I modified the pipe function in connection.c to pass only the
first character of the mode. This seems to work (fingers crossed). Then I
noticed gzfile has the same problem, but bzfile doesn't, and uses the same
solution as I did for pipe. Can I assume that this is a correct fix? Or were
there reasons that pipe and gzfile wouldn't allow "rb"?

Thanks,

Reid Huntsinger