Although it was pretty common up to the mid-1990s to run into 8-bit-cleanness problems and arbitrary buffer sizes, IMHO, the Unix ethos is not for `wc`, `tr`, `dd`, `sort`, `uniq`, `read`, `diff`, `patch`, or `split` to crash with certain input data, to silently corrupt that data, or to spew warning messages about its contents. They are building blocks for your programs; it is not their business to impose unnecessary expectations on your data. They can and should correctly handle arbitrary data. When they don't do that, they limit the programs you can write with them, and with no compensating increase in anything other virtue.