Yes, Macs have a backwards notion of what \r and \n are in ASCII (was this changed in OS X?) However, if the orginal poster is running the Perl script on a *nix or Windows box, it shouldn't matter.

BTW--My favorite way of dealing with the Mac's reversed notion of CR and LF is to use the octal ASCII value instead. \r = \015, \n = \012 (IIRC). You'll probably have issues with Unicode, though.