G'day thurinus,

Welcome to the Monastery.

As already indicated, it's likely you have line terminators not matching the '$'. You may have more success using '\R', the generic newline. See perlrebackslash: \R and note you'll need at least Perl v5.10 to use this.

Here's a quick-and-dirty example to compare '$' with '\R':

$ perl -E '
    my @x = (
        "A\n", "B.\n",
        "C\r", "D.\r",
        "E\r\n", "F.\r\n",
        "G\f", "H.\f"
    );
    say q{*** With $ ***};
    say "|$_|" for grep /\.$/, @x;
    say q{*** With \R ***};
    say "|$_|" for grep /\.\R/, @x;
'
*** With $ ***
|B.
|
*** With \R ***
|B.
|
|D.
|F.
|
|H.
   |
[download]

In case you didn't know, the '\f' is a form-feed.