To expand a bit on infoninja's response, Apache on Debian includes the following in /etc/apache/access.conf :

<Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin>
Options ExecCGI
</Directory>
[download]

Any executable script (#!/usr/bin/perl) placed in that directory will run, regardless of filename extension.

If you use CGI::Carp, as davorg wisely suggested, consider removing it once debugging is done. From a security standpoint, you may not want possible errors going out to the world.

    cheers,
    ybiC