Please look at the following tips, which will often answer your questions without the need to post at all. Every post to the newsgroup consumes the time and effort of readers all over the world, and your cooperation is essential to make the newsgroup useful for everyone. Perl 5.004 is the latest and most stable version of Perl. Many bugs have been fixed with this release, several useful new features added, and much more documentation has been provided. The perlfunc man page will give you more information on the return values from functions.
Many reusable modules are available for immediate download and use.
Good luck with your Perl work.