All Unicode characters are 16 bits wide (well, not strictly true...), but have a large variety of encodings. In UTF-8, for instance, the ASCII characters are encoded exactly the same way, so newline is, er, \n. UTF-7 is just plain silly, and UTF-16 is 16-bits wide, so newline would be \0\n.

(Note that the first 256 characters of Unicode are the ISO-8859-1, character set, better known as Latin-1. The first 128 are ASCII)

There again, in NT, text files are plain 8-bit ASCII (with the top-bit set characters being some godawful M$ encoding), so \r\n should indeed do the trick, unless you really are using some form of Unicode editor & file format. (Perl was written for Unix, where newline is just \n, but NT considers newline to be \r\n. Actually, only notepad seems to think that these days...)

Andrew.