If you want to lose that data, use chomp(), it will remove your current line-terminator.

The only actual problem is matching the first line.

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.
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Since chomp returns the chomped value you could even do something like

$next_line = chomp($cur_line) . $next_line;
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But I think that's starting to smell like a really dirty hack.

Makeshifts last the longest.