Just for the sake of completeness, I wanted to make sure you didn't also forget about 'chomp' - here's the 1st few lines of 'perldoc -f chomp':

       chomp VARIABLE
       chomp( LIST )
       chomp   This safer version of "chop" removes any trailing strin
+g that
               corresponds to the current value of $/ (also known as
               $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in the "English" module).  It r
+eturns
               the total number of characters removed from all its arg
+uments.
               It’s often used to remove the newline from the end of a
+n input
               record when you’re worried that the final record may be
+ missing
               its newline.  When in paragraph mode ("$/ = """), it re
+moves
               all trailing newlines from the string.  When in slurp m
+ode ("$/
               = undef") or fixed-length record mode ($/ is a referenc
+e to an
               integer or the like, see perlvar) chomp() won’t remove 
+any-
               thing.  If VARIABLE is omitted, it chomps $_.  Example:

                   while (<>) {
                       chomp;  # avoid \n on last field
                       @array = split(/:/);
                       # ...
                   }
[download]

HTH.