Double quotes interpolate, which means that variables get expanded within them, and escaped characters like \n and \r are interpreted as special. Single quotes are intrepreted literally, so

print "$string\n"; #(prints the current value of $string followed by a
+ newline)

print '$string\n' # prints out the characters $, s, t, r, i, n, g, \, 
+n
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(Update see String Literals in Perl for more info. We now return you to the original message) You may be relieved to find out that

print 'This must appear on its own line
';
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Sticks a newline into the printed string. And Learning Perl, from O'Reilly, certainly does cater to beginners; moreover, there is Learning Perl on Win32 Systems from the same publisher, and if you have something against Sebastopol, CA, Elements of Programming With Perl is out there.

When do you *need* to explicitly output \r ? I don't think one usually needs to worry about that under NT/2K. I do believe that Perl is smart enough to add it for you when needed. Unfortunately, I can't check that just now ... (I'm too much of a *nix guy these days)