Right, $/ isn't interpreted as a regex, just as a fixed token to split on. It has a few special cases, one of which is "" - this is what it calls "paragraph mode", not to be confused with jfriedl's pattern, which splits wherever a line ends in a period. $>="" splits on two or more consecutive blank lines - /\n\n+/ if you could do it that way. And setting $/ to undef causes it to read to end of file. You can also set it to a reference to an integer for fixed length record reading... see perldoc perlvar.