I think you misunderstood me. I'm not suggesting that you remove that line of code completely (obviously that's going to change the way your program works), just that if you ask Perl to join the lines separated by a space then you shouldn't be surprised if you get a space separating each lne :)

If (as it seems) you want to join the lines, but not get the space separating them, then ask Perl to join them with an empty string as the separator.

$text = join('', @LINES);
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<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
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