The problem is in downloads.pl, which you don't show. Undo your change, run the program from the command line with the -c flag, and fix the error there.

Without seeing the actual Perl code, there's not much to go on. If it worked before, though, and you changed something and now it doesn't work, whatever you changed broke it. Revert that.

I wouldn't rely on the error message from the shell script, as I'm not sure exit value 2 returned from Perl is meaningful across platforms. I really have no idea why that shell script would be useful.