Thank you for the helpful response. I was using strict but not warnings; adding the latter uncovered a couple of minor issues unrelated to this.

Oddly what did work was adding two chops (not chomps).

    chop $str;
    chop $str;
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Odd because I've never run across this problem before.

As to why I'm interspersing \n and $/, well let's just call it lazy typing, sometimes one seems easier than the other. :-)

Thanks again.