Two quick notes since you've described yourself as a newbie.

Some folks like to omit the "use warnings" in production code since the errors sometimes give up too much information to users who, if they are bad guys, can use it maliciously. But during development and testing it's pretty essential.

Also, if you are going to be taking input from users, you should seriously consider turning on taint mode with the -T option. It's beyond the scope here to explain how to untaint data. The perlsec document has info about that and a whole lot more.