As choroba correctly mentioned, function calls don't interpolate inside of strings (at least not unless you resort to some ugly trickery). The far better approach is this:

print "Please enter your name:\n";
chomp( $name = <> );
$x = ucfirst $name;
print $x;
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If you have a good reason for not wanting to use ucfirst, then you do have alternatives:

# The \u metacharacter acts only upon the first character.
# No need for substr.
$x = "\u$name";
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...or...

# Assuming Perl 5.14+
$x = $name =~ s/^(.)/\u$1/r;
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...or...

$x = $name;
$x =~ s/^(.)/\u$1/;
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But why isn't ucfirst available to you? Also, did you read through the code example I provided in my earlier Post? It should have made it reasonably clear that "\u$string" does what you want without resorting to using substr (unless we're not seeing some relevant code from you that would make this approach unsavory).