I sincerely doubt that XP or Strawberry has anything to do with this! This very simple program should work on any version of Perl and on any platform!

use warnings;
use strict;

print "type something: ";
my $input = <STDIN>;
print "you typed", $input;

# of course: 
# print "you typed $input";
# would be the same
[download]

I don't know if you are using some kind of development environment to run the code or not? Save this .pl file verbatim and run it from the Windows XP command line - not from within any development environment.

Before posting, I tested this on Win XP to avoid a typo problem. I am using an Active State build, but that shouldn't matter in the slightest.