Well, without the context, we'll probably be shooting in the dark. Put if I am guessing correctly from your variable name, the following should demonstrate something that will work for you:

perl -e'$text="now is the time for all good women."; $text =~ s/^([a-z
+])/\u$1/;print $text . "\n";print $1 . "\n"'
# outputs 'Now is the time for all good women.' and then 'n' on the ne
+xt line
[download]

You are printing afterwards, right? :)

--
Allolex

Update 2003-08-05 02:52:32 CEST: I can't believe I spent more than 15 minutes on this node... I think I'll go sleep.