Meaning of #!/usr/bin/perl

[raymonds]

In perl programs what is the meaning of using
#!/usr/bin/perl
in the first line.

[rbwire]

That first line is actually a very special comment. On Unix systems, if the very first two characters on the first line of a text file are "#!", then what follows is the name of the program that actually executes the rest of the file. In this case, the program is stored in the file /usr/bin/perl.