It's true that access prefers \r\n, but only if you're on a unix. On windows, access prefers the \n. The reason for the confusion is that \n isn't really a character, it's a LOGICAL newline. From perlport:

Perl uses "\n" to represent the "logical" newline, where what is logical may depend on the platform in use. In MacPerl, "\n" always means "\015". In DOSish perls, "\n" usually means "\012", but when accessing a file in "text" mode, STDIO translates it to (or from) "\015\012", depend- ing on whether you're reading or writing. Unix does the same thing on ttys in canonical mode. "\015\012" is com- monly referred to as CRLF.

So in order to fix unix newlines to dos newlines, you need to ADD a LF to the end of lines:

my $LF = "\012";
while (<>) }
  s/$/$LF/g;
}
[download]

-- Dan

$input =~ s/\n/\r\n/gs;
[download]

print "contains CR's!\n" if $input=~/\r/s;
print "contains NL's!\n" if $input=~/\n/s;
...
[download]

Thought I'd share a solution I have (FINALLY!!) found in case other people had experienced the same problem: If you have a text area field where the newlines are being ignored and showing up as little boxes, right click in the text area box then click on properties. Select the Format tab then scroll down to Numerical Shapes. Change this from System to Context and all the newlines reappear making your data finally make sense! Not really a Perl solution but it works so who cares!