Because the text is read from a file, all special characters are already escaped in the string... so "\t" is a literal "\t" rather than a tab. You could convert them to real tabs like this: 
$buf2 =~ s/\\t/\t/g;

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Hot Pastrami

In reply to Re: Problems with a search and replace script by Hot Pastrami
in thread Problems with a search and replace script by Anonymous Monk

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