If you found nothing because there is nothing to find, then you can be sure that apache didn't try to run the file as a CGI script, but delivers it as plain text.

Which means that there is no AddHandler cgi-script .pl directive active.

You could try to post the relevant parts of your apache configuration file here, maybe somebody can tell you what went wrong.

(Just to be sure, you restarted the web server after changing the config, right? and you access your pages via http://127.0.0.1/ ?)