I am going through the "Common Tasks" section of "Programming Perl" for Perl 4 and much of it is still relevant. Here was the program for de-hyphenating a file: 
perl -pe 's/-\s*\n$//' FILES

[download]
But I have several questions about this solution:
  1. Why is $ necessary to anchor the carriage return? You can't have a carriage return anywhere but the end of a line right?
  2. Shouldn't this example use $/ instead of \n? We need not be so architecture-dependant even though Unix r0olz.

Carter's compass: I know I'm on the right track when by deleting something, I'm adding functionality

In reply to PP4: "de-hyphenating a file" by princepawn

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