in reply to passing delimiters on command line

./script.pl \^V^I ARG1 ARG2
If you have a shell where in interactive mode tab means something special (like in bash), you need to escape the tab *twice*. First to take the tab as-is - this is done by typing a CNTL-V character before the tab. Then you need to tell the parser that it should take the tab as a symbol, and not as whitespace separating the symbols. This can be done by putting a backslash in front of it - or by putting it inside quotes.