G'day cyates,

You appear to have the answer to your immediate problem.

I started using Mac OS X Lion a couple of years ago and asked this question: "Are there any major Perl issues with Mac OS X Lion?".

You may find some of the information useful. With regards to the various "Don't use the system Perl" responses, I chose Perlbrew — still happily using that with Perl 5.18.0.