Perl refuses to run scripts

Question

I'm using Perl 5.14.2 on Cygwin, and suddenly it refuses to run the simplest of scripts:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
print "hello world!\n";

Trying to execute this causes Perl to do absolutely nothing, and neither does $? contain anything:

Administrator@Windows7 /cygdrive/d/Development/Perl
$ perl helloworld.plx

Administrator@Windows7 /cygdrive/d/Development/Perl
$ echo $?
0

However, I have written more complex scripts earlier, and they do run:

Administrator@Windows7 /cygdrive/d/Development/Perl
$ perl siteinfo.plx

Site info : google.com
________________________________________________________________________________
Whois : ( ... whois info printed here ...)
hpHosts : Not Listed

I really can't understand what is exactly going on here. I've tried reinstalling Perl but with no luck.

Any help is deeply appreciated.

Answer 1

The answer to this turns out to be very dumb:

My text editor was set to churn out text files with Macintosh EOL format. Converting it to Unix/Windows format corrects the issue.

However, one thing that I found strange was that Perl would not notify of this issue, and instead it simply did nothing.

Answer 2

Use B::Deparse to see how perl parses your program

  $ perl -MO=Deparse,-p -e ""
  -e syntax OK

  $ perl -MO=Deparse,-p -e "#!/usr/bin/perl -- die 666; "
  -e syntax OK

  $ perl -MO=Deparse,-p -e "die 666; "
  die(666);
  -e syntax OK