Hi,
I thought some of you might find this interesting. On freshmeat,
a fellow released a "shell script compiler" called "shc".
It's here
I've found it also works on perl scripts. :-)
It dosn't really produce a standalone executable. What it does
is encrypt your script with rc4, then puts a c-wrapper around it.
So it's basically just a way of hiding your source, but it won't improve execution speed, because it uses c to just call perl.
It does hide the script fairly well. Some of you might enjoy playing with it this weekend. :-) Of course, I would never run such a script handed to me, ha,ha, ha.