Corion is, of course, completely correct. You can find more about running perl programs in the perlrun manpage.

However, just for fun of course, you can make linux behave in a similar fashion to windows. If you run the following as 'root' in the shell:

modprobe binfmt_misc
                                                                      
+          
echo ':perl:E::pl::/usr/bin/perl:'>/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register
[download]

(Adjusting the path to perl as necessary) Then the Linux kernel will recognise the extension .pl as a program that will be run by perl without requiring a shebang line - of course the file still has to be executable. You probably don't want to do this on a production machine however and YMMV as regards the kernel configuration.

/J\