How do people chomp out a ^M symbol in *NIX?

chomp (click link; read documentation; do so now) uses $/. If you don't want to change $/, you can't use chomp to do what you want. In that case a simple regex or transliteration suffices: s/\cM//g or tr/\cM//d. The latter is faster.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }