Are you connecting to a Unix server from a windoze client? Domestos has a two characters at the end of a line. A line feed and a carriage return. Unix has just the line feed. I wrote a win32/unix client server app recently and didn't have any problems with the conversion. I wouldn't use a chop instead of chomp here but I doubt the carriage return is a random event. I've tried to re-create the problem with the following code on NT and Solaris but I'm afraid it works fine for me?

Server code on a unix box

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use IO::Socket;
print "Waiting...\n";
$socket = IO::Socket::INET->new(LocalPort => 4321, Proto => 'udp');
$socket->recv($text,128);
chomp $text;
print "Got this message: >${text}<\n";
close $socket;
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And the client

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use IO::Socket;
$x="my string ends here\n";
$sock = new IO::Socket::INET(
        PeerAddr => 'machine_name',
        PeerPort => 4321,
        Proto    => 'udp');

$sock->send($x);
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Produces;
Got this message: >my string ends here<

In my experience some ftp/udp/tcp clients leave the ^M on and some don't. If you have it check out Russ's node Removing ^M