Almost always, Perl is run as a script. For example, example.pl has the following.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
print "Hello World\n";

Running this script should output Hello World.

~]# perl example.pl
Hello World

Sometimes, you may want (or need) to run Perl on the command line. The -e option can be used to "execute" Perl commands on the command line.

~]# /usr/bin/perl -e "use strict; use warnings; print 'Hello World\n';"
Hello World