Just recently I had to make a script to strip html from a page which was generated by someone else's script. I guess they figured it wasn't important to be able to look at the source at all, because there isn't a single line break in the entire file. At 6.5 Megs, that's a long line. I'm not sure if you're actually trying to do something, or if this is a question for the sake of knowledge, but sucking up a (large) file/line all at once usually isn't such a good idea where memory is concerned.

You can change the line delimiter character in Perl, but that can easily lead to strange side effects elsewhere in a large script. More or less, you would probably be more interested in the read function.

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.