First off, im confused about the value of $/ on your machine. Are you doing this under AS perl or Cygwin perl?

Anyway, it looks like I was right, but I go with limbic~region. Dont mess with $/ instead use

s/[^[:graph:] ]//g foreach $user,$pass;
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Which will nuke any char that isnt in the below list

 !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>
?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]
^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
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Which im guessing is about right for legal chars (at least on an english machine) (note that a space is legal, but other whitespace chars arent.)

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....