Since you're new to Perl, I thought I would mention that Perl comes with a built-in debugger. You can run the debugger to track line-by-line what your program is doing right or wrong.

Simply type perl -d myprogram.pl to debug the perl script myprogram.pl. You can move from one line of your main program to the next by hitting the 'n' key. For more info type 'perldoc perldebtut' from the command line.

For a long time I avoided using debug mode, but now I know that it is my friend.