Strings all the way down?

I have some large binary objects that I'm trying to handle - about 2.6
MB. These are intermediates in an image processing routine that would
helpful to keep in memory rather than writing to a file. It seems that
they are getting truncated to 2.0 MB in memory. Run with the -p option,
I get: 

  Memory usage at completion:          0 window,    2420186 isolated

I thought I had 8 MB to play with and that variables were binary safe.
Is one or more of my assumptions wrong? My guess is that the file is
being trucated on input.

I have tested the commands in shell scripts where they work fine in
pipelines or storing the intermediates as files.

Chris

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