You posted too much code. I think that's the reason no-one else has responded to your question - we just don't have time to read that much code. You need to boil down your problem to just a few lines of code - you might find the problem yourself during this process, but if not you'll have something we can help you with.

But since I'm here anyway, I've got a random guess: something else is setting $/ in your program, messing up <> and causing you to get multiple lines in the (oddly named) $newline variable. I don't see how else that line could print two lines of text - but I do note that the code you posted isn't what produced the output you show... Maybe something changed aside from commenting some stuff out?

-sam