A snippet for testing perl scripts which may or may not be on point-

use Test::More;
use FindBin qw( $RealBin );
my $out = qx{ /bin/env perl -cw $RealBin/../bin/script.pl };

like( $out, qr{script.pl syntax OK},
      "Syntax OK" );
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Compiling it, even without "execution," can have side-effects because of BEGIN but it's safer than straight execution.