If the existence of the \r in the Windows files is the only thing buggering the works up then simply removing the \r should do the trick.

$slurp =~ s/\r//g;
[download]

or (from chromatic):

$slurp =~ tr/\r//d;
[download]

Do this right after you "slurp" the contents in. Then all should run the same for Linux flavors and Windows flavored files. Claude