you don't have to display HTML in a browser. Nearly all browsers can handle plain text. just print the MIME type in the header.

use CGI qw(:standard);
print header("text/plain");
print "text";
[download]

but that's from within a cgi, from the command line a script like this will work:

use Cwd;

$text='my text'; 
open(FILE,'>stuff.txt'); 
print FILE $text; 
close (FILE); 
system('iexplore '.cwd.'\stuff.txt');"
[download]

works if iexplore is on your path if not you can add directories to you PATH like so(Win ME example)

set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Progra~1\Intern~1;
[download]