There ar some special values that you can set $/ that give you various useful behaviours.

• $/ = undef puts Perl in "slurp" mode. The next read from a filehandle will read in all of the remaining records in the file.
• $/ = '' puts Perl in "paragraph" mode. In this mode, records are delimited by one or more blank lines.
• Setting $/ to a reference to a number (or a reference to a scalar holding a number) sets the record size to that number. The next read from a filehandle will read in that number of bytes.

Like all Perl special variables, you'll usually want to alter its value localised in a block.

my $text = do { local $/; $text = <FILE> };
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