I believe the fellow at work used chop because he wanted to have Perl return the line-ending character; chomp seems to return only a result code and not the "chomped" character.

I created a four-line text file in which two lines had CR/LF line endings and the other two had LF-only line endings. Then, a small script that reads each line of the file. Following is the business end of it. (All lines in the file have "F" immediately before the line boundary.)

  # TWO LINES IN THE FILE MEET THE FOLLOWING CRITERIA:
  print "ends CRLF\n" if /F\x0D\x0A$/;
  print "ends CRLF\n" if /F\r\n/;
  print "contains CR\n" if /\x0D/;
  print "contains CR\n" if /\r/;

  # AND THE OTHER TWO LINES IN THE FILE MATCH THIS:
  print "ends LF only\n" if /F\x0A$/;
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But the script printed only this: ends LF only. It never did print ends CRLF or contains CR.

If perl doesn't make some internal translation of the carriage-return characters when it's reading a file, then why that result? Are the tests above not sufficient?