Actually, this:

$s =~ s/^.//;
print "$s\n";
[download]

Could be written as:

$s =~ s/.//;
print "$s\n";
[download]

Update: I had assumed the string would only contain the regular \w characters; won't work for strings starting with \n, obviously (because the dot doesn't match newlines). See Re: cut of first char of a string.