But just to clarify, the biggest problem with that code fragment is not that it's lengthy, but that it discards the last line of the file when it does not end in a $/.

Exactly. And this is something that I never realized until someone pointed it out to me (just never really thought about it). I was fortunate enough to never have this bite me, and got out of the habit of the fragment before it did actually cause problems.

I don't have any good examples of my old bad code. But I'm referring to comments on how the Perl code is working when it is totally unnecessary. Comments like

# Make '3' into '03'
$some_value = sprintf "%02d", $some_value;
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or perhaps code snippets where it can easily be reduced -- note that this is a contrived example, because I tend to collapse my conditionals if possible (and have for a very long time). But still it illustrates my point:

my $time = localtime();
if ($time =~ /^Tue/i) {
    if ($time =~ /2005$/) {
        print "It's some Tuesday in 2005\n";
    }
}
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