one of my biggest gripes about perl on windows is file extension hell. on unix, you set the file executable and call it, so a script can be called whatever, on windows you need the .pl or some other association. files without extensions in windows are basically orphans

of course the dos shell is a joke compare to the unix shell, all these years (20+) and somehow they cannot provide a decent command line.

good luck with your linux experimment...you may want to even try out *BSD (glad this is a no-flame node) :)