Yes, "The behavior of chomp is independent of OS", True. Perl chomp will work fine across platforms. The "\n" in Perl generically means the "end of line" character(s).

On Windows, this means "carriage return, line feed". On Unix a single "line feed" is used, implying the "carriage return". I have a setup that allows me to use my local Windows Text editor to edit remote Unix files. When I send the file back to Unix, it can have mixed line endings (sometimes just a line feed and sometimes a carriage return and a line feed). Perl doesn't care about this and it not an issue. Some Unix utilites are not as "forgiving".

The easy way to "normalize" the line endings to the current platform:

while (<>)
{
   chomp;  #removes line endings of both varieties
   print "$_\n";  #prints with this platform's line endings.
}
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My main point was that chomp() is not needed because in this case, the line ending character(s) count as white space.