From all the reading I've done, and from all the advice I've been given, I make it a practice to *always* use warnings and strict, like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
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Doing that will save you some pain in that it won't allow you to do things like use variables before you declare them.

Check out the perl style guide where "warnings" and "strict" are described, by doing

   perldoc perlstyle
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at a command prompt.

HTH.