As
Fletch alludes. There's a more important safety mechanism in chomp than silently skipping the action if there is nothing to chomp. It also allows operating system independence, since it eats the line ending for your OS. If you ask an applicant to write a script, they may choose chomp, merely because they don't know which operating systems you'll eventually ask them to deploy on.
Sorry, but porting to a new OS should not require chop hacking on code when a chomp in the first place would have handled the problem.