I've never used the :raw layer and there appears to be some weirdness here. I'm not sure what "read a "line" with :raw" actually means? It looks to me like it removed the <CR> just like the normal layer would. When reading binary data, I have always set binmode and read up to a requested number of bytes into a buffer without the concept of a "line ending".

Setting just the :raw layer should be equivalent to setting binmode (if not, either the documentation in PerlIO or the implementation is broken), and resulting in a completely unmodified byte stream between perl and whatever is at the other end of the handle (file, socket, pipe, ...). readline will then behave as on Unix: neither \r nor \n are translated in any way when writing, and neither <CR> nor <LF> will be translated in any way when writing (Update:) reading. This results in perl treating <LF> as \n when reading, and so all text having <CR><LF> line endings will be read as ending with \r\n, chomp with a default $/ of "\n" will chew of just the \n and leave the line read with a trailing \r (read as <CR>).

See also "newlines" in perlport, and ":raw" in PerlIO.

I never did come up with a "clean, high performance" way to handle any variation of Mac, Unix and Windows line endings easily. I just don't support old Mac and that is good enough for my users.

$text=~s/\r\n/\n/g; $text=~s/\r/\n/g; should convert CRLF (DOS) to just LF (Unix), then bare CR (Mac) to just LF, resulting in $text having \n exactly at every line ending, no matter if the input had MAC, DOS, or Unix line endings. In a file with mixed line endings (which is IMHO a broken file), this may accidentally remove a few empty lines.

Alexander