I'm trying to teach myself Pearl, but for some reason the terminal will not let me run the programs that I am writing. I've tried the chmod u+x program_filename after I wrote the program, but that does not seem to be helping. Does anyone have any tips for me? :(

first of all, you mean perl, not pearl.

what command are you using to run the perl script?

can you post your script in this topic inside [code] tags?

I've tried both of these methods:
method 1
perl [-switch] program_name

method 2
put #!/usr/local/bin/perl at the first line in the script. (doesn't work with [#!/usr/bin/perl -w], either.
set file permission to be executable.
chmod u+x program_name
program_name

neither of them seemed to want to work.

Here's an example of a cript that I tried.

[#!/usr/bin/perl -w
print "Money value in US \$ ";
$us_money = <STDIN> ;
chomp $us_money;
$can_money = $us_money /0.6;
print "US\$ $us_money = Canandian \$ $can_money\n";]

sorry, that should be "script," not cript.