Prior posters have explained the basic idea, which is that you want to run the Perl interpreter from a command-line prompt, with a specific Perl program for it to run, rather than double-clicking within the Windows GUI.

Since you're running on Win2K, one additional trick that you can use is to set the PATHEXT environment variable so that Windows knows programs ending in .PL are executable (by calling the Perl interpreter). Try this at your DOS prompt:
SET PATHEXT=%PATHEXT%;.PL
Then you can just type:
myscript
at the command line, and in addition to the usual myscript.exe, myscript.com, and so forth, Windows will look for myscript.pl. And since it knows .pl is associated with the Perl interpreter (thanks to the ActiveState setup), everything should run. If you want to make it permanent, you can go into Control Panel | System | Advaned | Environment Variables and make the change there. (Caveats: To the best of my knowledge this will work on any NT-derived system including XP, but not Windows9x/ME. Also, it does have some limitations if you want to use your programs to do piping/filtering, but that probably won't be a concern for you in the near term.)

Running the perl interpreter without any filename can be vaguely useful under certain circumstances. Specifically, you can type in a quick-and-dirty program and have it interpreted on the spot -- the trick is that you need to press Control-Z to send an end-of-file marker so that Perl knows you're done sending it input. I don't often find this useful in practice -- I like to save code I've written! -- but if you want to make "Hello, world" work in a totally non-reusable way, you could do this: 

perl[Enter]
print "Hello world!";[Enter]
[Control-Z][Enter]

[download]

Anyway, good luck... stick with Perl through some of the initial frustration and you will eventually wonder how you ever lived without it!!

In reply to Re: Perl Dumbass needs a hand-holding by seattlejohn
in thread Perl Dumbass needs a hand-holding by tacojohn

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