Not all Perl is CGI and not all CGI is Perl.

There was nothing in your original post that told us that you were using CGI and generating HTML. Without that information any answer that we could have given would have been complete guesswork. It's only because your later post included a use of CGI.pm that we are able to work out what your problem is.

If you're having a problem with the output from a CGI program then you should always check the actual output rather than the output as rendered by a browser. You can do that by running the program in your browser and using the "view source" menu item. Or you can run the program from the command line (in which case you may need to go to a little more effort and simulate the CGI environment).

Had you done that, you would have seen that the newline is created in your output exactly as you wanted it. The problem is that browsers ignore most newlines when rendering HTML. Your problem then becomes an HTML problem rather than a Perl problem.