Yes, graff, you are right in observing that my regex contains two linebreaks - in contrast to what I actually intended to do. The curious thing is that the regex performs as expected when it should match one linebreak but not when it contains two linebreaks - in that case it appears to do NOTHING at all, although the file definitely does contain several consecutive linbreak-only lines.
I am still puzzled and am starting to believe the issue is not due to the Perl-side of things but rather an I/O or even a Linux problem.
Any conejectures on this one?
Thanks again -
Pat