in reply to Re: so brand newbie it's sick...
in thread so brand newbie it's sick...

type perl -e "Hello World!\n"
Ofcourse that will generate an error message:
remco@grolsch remco$ perl -e "Hello World!\n"
bash: !\n": event not found
You might want to try this instead:
remco@grolsch remco$ perl -e 'print ("Hello World!\n")'
Hello World!