From what I can gather from reading your post, you're trying to launch the perl script from your window manager. Is this correct?

If so, what's most likely happening is that it's opening a terminal window, running the script, and then closing the window upon script completion. You might want to, instead, open up a terminal window yourself, and at the prompt, locate wherever you saved the file to and run perl myscript.pl (or whatever you have it named). When it's done running, it should return you back to the command prompt.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your question or situation.

-s.