I wanted the same thing I think - remove leading and trailing space, on a per line basis, ignoring newlines. I've just done this and it seems to work, i.e. linecount remains same before and after. 
cat test.dat | perl -n -e 'chomp; s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; print "$_\n";'

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In reply to Re^2: TRIM in Perl? by Anonymous Monk
in thread TRIM in Perl? by peacemaker1820

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