Personally I prefer cperl-mode over the (IIRC) older perl-mode.

Place the following in your ~/.emacs or ~/.xemacs/init.el file to have (X)Emacs automatically turn on cperl mode for perl scripts:

;; Use cperl-mode instead of the default perl-mode
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.\\([pP][Llm]\\|al\\)\\'" . cperl-m
+ode))
(add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist '("perl" . cperl-mode))
(add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist '("perl5" . cperl-mode))
(add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist '("miniperl" . cperl-mode))
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You might also want to put

;; Turn on paren matching and font-lock for all modes
(global-font-lock-mode t)
(show-paren-mode t)
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