If you want clean output text, with proper newlines for your OS at the end of each line, instead of that weird dangling ^M (which tells me that perhaps the file isn't native to that OS, and/or was not properly transferred via ASCII when it was FTP'd?), a simple regular expression (or perhaps even something simpler like chomp or chop) might do the job for you: 
s/\s*$/\n/s;        # assuming \s will catch your newline
s/\s*[\r\n]+$/\n/;  # otherwise, this should do it

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Or, if you just want to use substr: 
substr($_, -2, 2) = undef;   # deletes last 2 characters
substr($_, -3, 3) = "\n";    # if your string ends in a newline

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In reply to Re: substring function by Fastolfe
in thread substring function by Anonymous Monk

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