First question: What do you get when you run it from the command line?

Second question: Did you create this file on the box, or did you upload it from a Windows machine? If the latter, did you sent it as a binary or as a text file? In the case of a text file, line endings are translated appropriately, whereas as a binary file it is sent as-is. An easy way to make sure this isn't the issue is to do the following:

    perl -p -i.bak -e "s/\r//g" filename
[download]

This will create a backup of the file with the extension .bak, and remove the characters, if it is the case.

Third thought: Add the line $| = 1; after your use strict; line. This will turn off output buffering, and save you headaches later.

Are there any additional clues in the apache error_log?

If the above don't help, then I would suggest you do an ls -l /usr/bin/perl from the command line, which will show you if /usr/bin/perl is actually a symbolic link elsewhere.

Hope that helps....