Hmm, you might be right about the conversion - All my windows perl runs under cygwin anyway so I don't really get to see that pain and my understanding may be flawed.

I do have to stand my ground on

"That regexp is incomplete. It doesn't handle systems that use \r as the EOL marker."

however - which of the two operating systems I mentioned (UNIX and Windows) use \r as the EOL marker? In fact I specifically said in the next paragraph:

Of course the other EOL possibility is that of a Classic MacOS text file, where the EOL marker is a lone carriage return (ie. \r). Mercifully you won't come across these files nearly as much as you used to and dealing with them is an exercise left to the reader ;)