in reply to ActiveState woes : Is it EOF-blind?

The only hint, that even under Solaris, respectively Cygwin, something unusual is going on, is the fact that in the (otherwise correct) output, the last line is preceded by a single space.

The space is probably the list separator character ($") which separates the list elements when your array is interpolated into the double quoted string.

See LIST_SEPARATOR in perlvar for details

perldoc perlvar

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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom