That's not what I meant. :) When we discussed it in the chatterbox, you said

another interesting clue is that now UltraEdit isn't asking if I want it converted to DOS format anymore

I interpreted that to mean that you were doing some cross-platform dos-unix stuff, and chomp won't chomp correctly if you run it on unix but feed it input with ms-dos style newlines. That's because unix uses LF for newline, and ms-dos uses CRLF. I have no idea if this applies to what you were doing, but your program works fine on my solaris box, with or without CGI.