They are roughly the same but I keep running into an issue where that input on the terminal outputs: Can't open perl script .... No such file or directory. I'm assuming I have a path issue, but now I'm really lost. And I thought mentioning it would be extra information that would lead me to a better answer, but now that I think about it, it's rather silly.
This is more an issue with operating and navigating your operating issue than with Perl. It seems as if you are unclear about the actual location of your Perl script.
Maybe you can find the location of your Perl script with the find command, assuming that you are on a Unixish OS: