I'm not a big fan of the documentation you quoted. It muddles the distinction between processing of "\n" during I/O operations and the value of "\n" in a Perl string. This muddling helps lead to the confusion that we see several places in this thread.

"\n" is "\cJ" on nearly all platforms even though writing it to an I/O handle doesn't produce (just) "\cJ" on many platforms. "\n" could be any single character on a non-ASCII system. On an ASCII system, "\n" is "\cJ" except on (some?) Mac systems. But on Win32, writing "\n" actually sends either "\r\n" or "\n" depending on whether binmode is in effect. On VMS (which is an ASCII system, BTW), writing "\n" might not write any data to the file (but instead result in meta-data that denotes where the record ends), it all depends on the "structure" of the file in question (most files on VMS are not simply "streams").

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")