This is covered on page 2 of the first edition; I find
it hard to believe it isn't also covered right at the
beginning of the second edition.
As it says in the first, start by typing the following
at a shell prompt:
perl
If you get "not found", then you don't have perl
installed (at least not adequately for your needs)
on your computer, so you need to start by getting
it installed.
Once it's installed appropriately, and you have a
script called, say, 'hello.pl' in the current directory,
you can run it by entering:
perl hello.pl
or, if you have set permissions appropriately:
./hello.pl
hth
