good news. I followed the step for "Mac setup to connect to a MS SQL Server" and got below working from the terminal:

DESKTOP-J2QR254:etc raventheone$ tsql -S servername.xxxx.xxxx.net -U username -P password -D dbname
locale is "C"
locale charset is "US-ASCII"
using default charset "ISO-8859-1"
Setting dbname as default database in login packet
1> 
2> SELECT * FROM vBO_InternalWalletsList
3> GO
WalletId	Name	CreditKey

i can access the db with this. but still the goal is to do it through perl script.

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but using below in /usr/local/etc/freetds.conf:

[MYMSSQL]
        host = servername.xxxx.xxxx.net
        port = 1433
        tds version = 7.0


does not work:

DESKTOP-J2QR254:etc raventheone$ tsql -S MYMSSQL -U username -P password -D dbname
locale is "C"
locale charset is "US-ASCII"
using default charset "ISO-8859-1"
Msg 40615 (severity 14, state 1) from SQL Azure Line 1:
	"Cannot open server 'mymssql' requested by the login.
	Adaptive Server connection failed
There was a problem connecting to the server

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also if i use odbc i get this:

DESKTOP-J2QR254:etc raventheone$ isql -v servername.xxxx.xxxx.net username password
[IM002][unixODBC][Driver Manager]Data source name not found and no default driver specified
[ISQL]ERROR: Could not SQLConnect


/Library/ODBC/odbc.ini
[MYMSSQL]
Description         = Test to SQLServer
Driver              = FreeTDS
Trace               = Yes
TraceFile           = /tmp/sql.log
Database            = dbname 
Servername          = servername.xxxx.xxxx.net 
UserName            = username
Password            = password 
Port                = 1433
Protocol            = 7.3 
ReadOnly            = No
RowVersioning       = No
ShowSystemTables    = No
ShowOidColumn       = No
FakeOidIndex        = No



/Library/ODBC/odbcinst.ini

[FreeTDS]
Description=FreeTDS Driver for Linux & MSSQL on Win32
Driver=/usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so
Setup=/usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so
UsageCount=1