Uhm, these are all broken. You are forgetting to remove the trailing newline before you concatentate. See Re: (MeowChow) Re2: Look ahead and join if the line begins with a + PS The compact example is even more broken - try running it on the sample data set.

my @lines = s//join'',<DATA>/e ? s/\n\+//g ? split "\n" : ($_) :($_);
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cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print