Have you seen Conway and Ingerson's evil Inline::Files yet? This is way cool:

use strict;

use vars qw($DATA);
use Inline::Files;

open DATA or die $!;
chomp ($_ = <DATA>);
close DATA or die $!;

print "you have run this script @{[++$_]} times\n";

open DATA, ">$DATA" or die $!;
print DATA $_;
close DATA or die $!;

__DATA__
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jeffa

you have run this script 1 times? grammar shmammar ;)