But unlike C, Perl steals some of those arguments from the script for its own purposes. The shell separates arguments on space characters. See the perldoc perlrun page for further information on the switches that Perl has to offer from the command line. Perhaps some examples would be best at this point. In the spirit of this column, let's use one-liners.
Shells make everything between quotes a single argument.
Single quotes are better, because then you can use double quotes inside the one-liner. Double quotes in Perl serve to interpret everything between them. Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors. See perldoc perlrun for more details, but basically you should find out what works on your system and stick with that. See perldoc perlrun for the complete list and some usage ideas.