Perl seems to write the file in latin1 independent of the actual input
encoding. This can corrupt the "description" field of /etc/passwd. By
setting "binmode" to ":utf8" Perl can be forced to write UTF-8. Ideally
the program would simply read/write the fields by value without any
changes in encoding. However, assuming/enforcing UTF-8 is a lot better
than using an obsolete coding like latin1.