...that the chomp($temp) would spare me all the nasty newline problems

Depends on what's in $/.  $/ by default holds "\n". On Windows, the :crlf PerlIO layer is responsible for translating "\r\n" to "\n". On Unix, this layer is not active (by default), so in case you have input coming from Windows (via cut-n-paste, or whatever), the carriage returns will survive.