3) I don’t think there’s a name that can explain what this library does, without being ridiculously long.

if ( grep {$_ satisfies some condition) } @foo) {
# do something
}

2) For removing newlines, use the chomp() function: it will remove the newline for your platform, regardless of whether that’s a \r\n, \n, or whatever.
$line =~ s/[\r\n]//g;

For removing leading whitespace, you need to remember that tabs are whitespace, too.
#$line =~ s/^[\s\t]*//;

So, the standard perlish way to remove newlines and strip leading whitespace would be:

chomp($line);
$line =~ s/^\s//g;

3) Why is the module called “Peanuts”? Perl has too many poor choices for names already:
grep instead of “any”, for example. Give your module a name that explains at a glance
what it’s trying to do.

Andrew: I don’t know whether the line contains an end-of-line. It might be \r or \r\n (or perhaps something weird, like \r\r\n) or no newline at all.

I’m totally with you on elegance. I get the same longing for ruby everytime I write a line of PHP at work.
I completely hate PHP’s sorting mechanism usort. Check out the docs here http://us.php.net/usort
You could rewrite those 8 lines of sorting code into one with ruby. Also, passing a function by using a string as usort does? How much uglier can it get. Procs and closures rule!