Help would be appreciated...

CGI Help Guide

Did you try to run it as ./script.pl through SSH. That is how Apache runs it. I suspect you did perl script.pl. Two things. chomd 755 script.pl, then try ./script.pl. If that works wohoo, if not RTFM above. perl -pi 's/\r//' script.pl would be next on the list, followed by which perl.