How do I read a binary file in perl?

In some forms, however, serialization has the disadvantage that because the encoding of the data is serial, merely extracting one part of the data structure that is serialized means that the entire object must be reconstructed or read before this can be done. The serialization capabilities in the Cocoa framework, NSKeyedArchiver, alleviate the problem somewhat by allowing an object to be archived with each instance variable of the object accessible by using a key.