Thanks for the responses - and I did do extensive searching (i.e. that's what I found when searching - that perl should never see the CR). However, I'm seeing something different (running as "perl cmds.pl" in a Command Prompt on Windows 10)

File 'cmds.pl':

open my $makefileToProcess, "<", "input_file.txt" or die "input_file.t
+xt: $!";
while (my $line = <$makefileToProcess>)
{
print "LINE BEFORE:$line:\n";
    chomp $line;
print "LINE AFTER:$line:\n";
}
[download]

And what I see is:

LINE BEFORE:xyzCRLF:
LINE AFTER:xyzCR:
[download]

(NOTE that CRLF is the CRLF pair, not actual 'C''R'L'F'. Same with CR.)

What's even more interesting is if, instead of running as "perl cmds.pl", I use the Windows ".pl" association, and run simply as "perl_cmds.pl", it works as you described (i.e. the CR is never seen).

In this case, I have 2 different perl implementations installed, one being cygwin (perl version 5.26, which is the one that keeps the CR) and the other being a standalone perl (perl v5.8.8, which is the one that eliminates the CR).

This is why I originally asked how the default IRS gets set, but perhaps the real question is why one perl on a Windows system is allowing the CR to pass through to the perl script.