Hey guys... i recently got linux RH... using the unix prompt... i create my files and everything... yet the even though i have the correct first line of my script i still have to execute the perl script with : perl script.pl

any reason for this??? help me out guys

your files need to be set executable.

chmod +x filename

Then you can do ./filename and have the perl interpreter invoked, assuming the first line is
#!/path/to/perl