$1 doesn't do what I think you think it does. In Perl, what you're calling $1 is called $ARGV[ 0 ]. Perl's $1 is used to refer to the first of a regular expression's "captured" matches. See perlretut and perlre.

Anyway, if I'm guessing correctly what you have in mind, and I am the happy beneficiary of a typical Unix shell, and I want to use perl to do this, I'd do:

perl -le 'print q{hello)' > test.pl
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