in reply to perl 1-liner to join a list?

perl -e "chomp(@F=<>); print join',',@F" file
?
Or if you're not worried about possibly having a comma after the last line:
perl -pe "tr/\n/,/" file
- or do it all with command line args and have no program:
perl -l0054pe '' file
If you don't want a trailing comma:
perl -pe "eof or tr/\n/,/" file