Out of interest, what was the debian package you were examining?

qwurx shmem ~/stuff > file foo foo: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamic +ally linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.0.0, stripped

Linux 2.0.0 makes me think it's quite an old package, and created with a correspondingly ancient version of perl2exe. My company uses v8.80, which is not as trivial to extract the source from.