Win8 Strawberry 5.8.9.5 (32) Fri 10/23/2020 18:12:03 C:\@Work\Perl\monks >perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -MData::Dump=dd my $line = "foo,bar\n"; $line = substr($line, -2, 2, '') . "\n"; dd $line; ^Z "r\n\n" #### >perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -MData::Dump=dd my $line = "foo,bar\n"; $line = substr($line, 0, -2) . "\n"; dd $line; ^Z "foo,ba\n" #### >perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -MData::Dump=dd my $line = "foo,bar\n"; substr($line, -3, 2, ''); dd $line; ^Z "foo,b\n"