I'm pretty baffled that all these things don't work. Can you put your problem files online maybe?

0d is hex for \r, 0a is hex for \n. I made myself a testfile by: perl -e 'print "aa\r\nab\r\n\r\naa\nbb\n"' >test Than I tried to get items out from it by: perl -e '$/="\r\n\r\n"; print "\tMy item: $_" while (<>);' <test This gave me the following output:

        My item: aa
ab
 
        My item: aa
bb
[download]

So that seems to work. I don't see why this would work and the others not, so I tried another one:  perl -e 'undef $/;@a=split(/\r\n\r\n/,<>); print join "\t My item: ", @a;' <test Which gave a similar result. There must be something special to your case.

Hope this helps a bit,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)