I don't know if this will help you, but have a look at the chomp function to lop off trailing newline characters.

also i observed at times the output of a previous selection is sent on subsequent selection at times

Hmm. If you are talking about the menu of a previous key press being sent with a next one, then I'd say this is a buffering issue. Try unbuffering STDOUT:

select((select STDOUT, $|++)[0]);
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CU
Robartes-