That bit about having run-on lines with ^M delimiters would make me want to try something like this (not tested): 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

die "Usage:  $0  filename.csv\n" unless ( @ARGV and -f $ARGV[0] );

for my $csvname ( @ARGV ) {
    my $records = read_csv( $csvname );
    if ( ref( $records ) ne 'ARRAY' ) {
        warn "Unable to pull records from file $csvname\n";
        next;
    }
    elsif ( @$records == 0 ) {
        warn "No csv data found in file $csvname\n";
        next;
    }
    do_something( $records );
}

sub read_csv
{
    my $filename = shift;
    open( IN, "<", $filename ) or do {
        warn "open failed on $filename: $!\n";
        return;
    };
    local $/;
    my $alldata = <IN>;
    my @records = grep !/^#|^\s*$/, split( /[\r\n]+/, $alldata );
    return \@records;
}

sub do_something
{
    # because just being able to read is seldom enough...
}

[download]
I suppose if your files are really huge (hundreds of MB), the slurping and splitting might be impractical. But these days, anything up to a 100 MB or so should fit comfortably.

(Updated to fix grammar in the opening sentence. I'd also suggest that "read_csv" should really be called something else, like "read_file_data" -- there's nothing particularly "csv-ish" about that sub.)

In reply to Re: Parsing a text file by graff
in thread Parsing a text file by calmthestorm

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