c:\@Work\Perl\monks\marek1703>perl -wMstrict -le "use Data::Dump qw(pp); ;; for my $s (qq{foo\r\n}, qq{foo\r}, qq{foo\n}, qq{foo}) { if ($s =~ /foo$/) { print 'matched: ', pp $s; } else { print 'no match: ', pp $s; } } " no match: "foo\r\n" no match: "foo\r" matched: "foo\n" matched: "foo"