I've finally managed to figure out what was going on. Turns out that the file had CRs on _some_ of the lines. That was accounting for the weird behavior that chomp was working only some of the time. Looking at my logs, I must have created the file on a windows machine at work when I was originally working with this. Since the original file was worked on by various scripts before getting to the one I was working with now, I lost track of where it was created. This is why y'all are the monks, and I'm still re-learning :-) Thanks so much for the help!!