This is a Debian (or Ubuntu?) problem, not a Perl problem.

You should take care that perl is installed through the package manager, and that it is a bit more up to date than now.

In Debian Stable perl Version 5.8.8-7 is standard, so your system is either rather old or broken.

Probably you need to edit /etc/apt/source.list, then run apt-get update and then apt-get install perl perl-doc