Ahh! The lights come on! (Then they go dim again) I changed the

        $fname =~ s/^\s+(.+?)\W*$/$1/;
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to

        $fname =~ s/^\s*(.+?)\W*$/$1/;
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and the problem went away. (Of course it did. I should have seen that.) I can see why with the '+' it didn't work right, but why would the failure manifest as a CR at the end of $fname?
But I am perplexed about the split itself. I replaced the (",") with (",\s*") and got the error:

Unrecognized escape \s passed through at phonelist.pl line 28.
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The paren/quote format worked fine with just a comma but broke with the addition of the space char class. Did I just get lucky the first way?

As to the LIMIT option, my Llama book doesn't explain it. Does the 2 relate the expectation of having two char within the match?