Not wrap them, but write them to seperate lines (carriage return at column 81) Please if what I am asking does not make sense, let me know, I will try yo explain it another way.

That's what wrapping means.

...Although Text::Wrap will only break on a word boundary. Did you want to break at colomn 80 unconditionally, even if it's in the middle of a word?

$text =~ s/(.{80})(?!$)/$1\n/gm;
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Sounds like this guy has to write stuff to make an IBM mainframe or other hunk of old iron happy (been there, done that).

What you could try (with no guarantees of success ;-) ) is to set local $/ = 80;. This will read the file in chunks of 80 bytes (note that the docs say bytes, but beware that "byte" and "character" are sometimes used interchangeably). You could also try working with sysread, which has an option to read a specific number of bytes.

$/ doesn't help. (And don't forget the RHS needs to be a reference: local $/ = \80;)

local $/ = \10;  # Easier to visualize than 80.
print "$_\n" while <DATA>;
__DATA__
abcdefghijklm
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
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outputs

abcdefghij
klm
ABCDEF
GHIJKLM
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instead of

abcdefghij
klm
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLM
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read (or unbuffered sysread) can do it with some coaxing.

my $wrap_len = 10;

my $buf = '';
LOOP:
for (;;) {
   while (length($buf) < $wrap_len+1) {
      my $rv = read(DATA, $buf, $wrap_len+1-length($buf), length($buf)
+);
      die if not defined $rv;
      last LOOP if not $rv;
   }
   
   ($buf =~ s/^(.*)\n// || $buf =~ s/^(.{0,$wrap_len})//)
      and print("$1\n");
}

print($buf);

__DATA__
abcdefghijklm
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
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The +1 avoids adding a \n before another \n.

perl -pe 's/(.{80})/$1\n/g'
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