The problem is not the line breaks - you're not opening the file.

{
    open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!;
    while (<$fh>) {
        print;
    }
}
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You may need to also set $/ = "\r" but that seems like an odd record separator to me.

Don't let Steve Jobs hear you.

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: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

Unix (and any similar system) thinks lines end with \n. Apple thinks they end with \r. DOS couldn't decide, so it went with \r\n. Under Unix-like systems, the \r often shows up as '^M'.

Perl will change what it thinks the line ending is based on what system you're running on. You can override this by setting $/ (input record seperator) to whatever you want the newline to be (even to something that isn't a newline at all, like 'FOOBAR'). Just set local $/ = "\r"; before you read the data in and it should work.

There are also conversion programs around that will change the line endings used on one system to another (look around for 'dos2unix', 'unix2mac', etc.)

Under Unix-like systems, the \r often shows up as '^M'

Correction, under Unix-like text editors like vi, emacs, pico, nano ... although most can be configured to not care what the "line endings" are

That's why I said "often shows up as", not "always show sup as".

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: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

$wholefile=join("",<FILE>); $wholefile=~tr/\cM/\n/;
print CONVERTED $wholefile;
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I would think about either using the more efficient idiomatic slurp (i.e. my $wholefile = do { local (@ARGV, $/) = $filename; <> };) or using the excellent and even more efficient File::Slurp module.

OK, cool thank you for your prompt replies.
So, i finally get the file to output, line by line, with this code:

#!/usr/bin/perl - w
use strict;

local $/="\cM";
my $file = $ARGV[0];
open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!;
while(<$fh>){
print $_."\n";
}
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I had to add the "\n" to the end of each line so that it printed out correctly in the unix system, the reason given by you guys

However, what if my file could be EITHER *nix/mac or windows, what's the best way to tell??

I'm hoping you can use a regular expression with the '$/' and do something like this:

local $/ = "[\n\r\cM]";
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which then gets regexp for any or either, does that make sense?

Cheers
Sam

Sorry, no regexen are allowed in $/.

The best solution is to convert the data file into a consistant form before the main program gets it.

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: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

You can do exactly what you asked for with File::Stream. A moderately portable regular expression to use is qr/\r\n?|\n\r?/. That should handle Unix, DOS and MacOS line endings on any of those three platforms.

Nope, no regexes for $/. If the file isn't too large or performance isn't too critical, you could do something like (untested, and requires 5.8.0):

open my $fh, "filename" or die $!;
while (my $line = <$fh>) {
   local $/ = "\r";
   open my $fh, "<", \$line or die $!;
   while (my $line = <$fh>) {
      # process $line here
   }
}
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Otherwise, open the file and read a bunch of characters (e.g. by setting $/=\1024; see perldoc perlvar) and check for \n or \r (e.g. with $/ = $1 if $buffer=~/([\r\n])/;)and set $/ appropriately; then seek to the beginning of the file and start the read loop.