My manual says that there is a way but only by using the shell, now that would be very old fashioned for such a sophisticated language.

Notwithstanding how "old fashioned" using the shell may seem to you, or even actually be, a CLI shell is still the best way, and the most efficient one, for one to work in many circumstances, and in fact the "sophistication" of a language like Perl has nothing to do with the ability of the OS it's run on to call it by clicking on a fancy icon in a GUI, indeed "simplicity is the essence of happiness" and believe it or not advanced users tend to prefer shell based environments. Actually there are now desktop environments for *NIX osen which imitate and even go far beyond Windows' bells-and-whistles-ness, but even there people often has a bunch of terminal emulators open to do, well, stuff. The rationale being, it's had to think you can get out more and more quickly out of a mouse with three or so buttons than from a keyboard with one hundred and odd...