As a side note, don't use chop to get rid of newlines. I see this all the time in programs and it makes me cringe. You want to use chomp.

chomp will only remove the last character if it's a newline. Consider the following "harmless" code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while (<DATA>) {
    chop;
    print "$_\n";
}

__DATA__
this is a test
this is another
[download]

You can't see it in the above code, but I deliberately did not hit "Enter" after the last line. I even hit backspace a few times to ensure that there was nothing after the word "another". The result?

this is a test
this is anothe
[download]

chop happily removed the "r" in another. chomp was designed for situations like that and should be used where appropriate.

Cheers,
Ovid