Couple of things to point out here. First of all, one of the lines in your code isn't doing what you think it's doing:

chomp(my $success = open OUT, ">$file_path"); # test for open omitted 
+for space concerns
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open returns 1 on success and 0 on failure. What you're doing here is assigning the return value from open to the $success variable and then chomping it. For future reference always check the return value from open like this:

open(OUT, $file_path) || die "Couldn't open $file_path - $!\n";
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Secondly, you are blindly accepting and using parameters without un-tainting them. If you don't know what this means, check out Ovid's CGI course, particularly the security section.

Lastly, to answer your original question, if the newlines are at the end you need to be chomping the $new_text variable prior to printing it to $file_path.

-- vek --