Something like this might be what you're looking for:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/[\n\r]+//g' myfile
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This will strip all the carriage returns and linefeeds and then overwrite the original file. A backup file will be created with a .bak extension, just in case.

-- Mike

--
just,my${.02}

update: thelenm's solution is more elegant, but here's my (more or less) standard solution:

$_ = $ARGV[0];

$outFile = "$_.1";
open(OUTFILE, ">$outFile") or die "Can't open '$outFile' for writing: 
+$!";
open(FILE, $_) or die "Can't open '$_': $!";
while (<FILE>) {
    chomp;
    print OUTFILE $_;
}
close(FILE);
close(OUTFILE);
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Cē

I doubt you really want to do it the way you describe ... removing all the \n before doign anything else. Much better to process one line at a time, unless you really need access tot he whole file.

open FILE, "<", $filename;

while(<FILE>) {
   chomp;
   # mode processing goes here
}
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s/[\n\r\f]//g
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perl -i.tmp -p yourscript.pl file.txt
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open (F,"file.txt");
@ar = <F>;
close(F);
foreach (@ar) {
    s/[\n\r\f]//g;
    # do what you want with the line.
}
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