Further to the excellent response from Tux, I tend to use the form #!/usr/bin/env perl which pulls the version of perl from your environment - this is handier if, as I have, you one, or other, or both, of the following situations...

• Different versions of perl against which you are(required to be) testing/running your code &/or...
• Different *NIX platform configurations on which you are testing/running your code

The above is, of course, moot if you have to run on Windoze, where all sorts of other problems come into play e.g. as you suggest, the shebang line is ignored etc. hence work-rounds have to be used e.g. batch files containing the full perl script (incl. the shebang line) together with the -x CLI option (see perlrun).