There are a couple of possibilities. If you transferred this to the Linux box and didn't deal with the \r\n line ending, you should either have a dos2unix utility, or you can use the following one-liner to correct this:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/\r\n$/\n/' somescript.pl
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The above will do the conversion. Actually, just stripping the carriage return is probably fine (s/\r//), but if, for some reason, you had a carriage return anywhere else, you might not want to strip those (can't see why you would, though).

To verify that the carriage return is actually there, though (the above is wasted if it's not):

cat -vE somescript.pl
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With that cat command, if you see ^M before the final $, then you know you have carriage returns that need to be stripped.

Cheers,
Ovid

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inventory was written on a Windows box running cygwin, and I'm modifying and testing it on a Linux laptop

You are correct, I see that problem when the line endings are incorrect for the platform. You need to remove the \r from the line endings in *nix (Win \r\n ends a line - *nix \n ends a line). There are several examples on this site.

The other choice is to trasfer the files via FTP/SFTP/SCP and specifiy them a text/ascii and it will do the line termination conversion for you.

=) dos endings are going to drive you nuts till you learn to move files with ftp and text mode rather than binary mode.

Or in perl you can fix the file with perl -pi.bak -e 's/\r\n/\n/'

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

I posted an explanation of this behavior at Re: Turning *off* warnings causes the script to fail :( if you're interested.