I just realised I completely ignored one of your questions.

Wouldn't your code mean the lines are stripped of the line feeds they originally had?

Yes, as I coded it the newlines would be removed. This would effectively do a free chomp @test;. I don't see this as a problem as it would cost very little to replace them when writing the lines out again.

However, if you want them left in place, then you could use the following split instead.

#! perl -slw
use strict;

my $file = 'test.txt';

open DF, '<:raw', $file or die "$file : $!";
my @test = split /(?<=\n)/, do{ local $/ = \ -s( $file ); <DF> };
close DF;
[download]

All that said, if you are only appending to the end of the file, why read the file at all? Have you heard of opening a file for append?