For the life of me I couldn't (and still can't) figure out how it happened, but a special character must have been inserted into my perl file. I just couldn't see how the compiler was failing where it was, because it looked like fine to me. I asked someone else to look at it, and then he said that it should work as well. I don't know how I came to the conclusion that I should just use putty's copy and paste function, to copy the code, and re-paste it into the same document, but for some reason it worked! Ironically enough, btw, I just added to my home node my favourite type of coffee, which a local coffee shop has... Cheers.