Ok, here's the answer!
subscriptions.pl had DOS line termination characters on each line. ksh could not understand the header #!/usr/bin/perl because it saw it as #!/usr/bin/perl^M - thus, the "no such file or directory" message when attempting to execute the script directly. The perl interpreter itself had no problem with these DOS terminators, so "perl subscriptions.pl" worked fine.
Oddly enough, so did the header #!/usr/bin/perl -w (really #!/usr/bin/perl -w^M). I guess moving that ^M over prevented the shell from trying to call the literal program "perl^M", which, of course, doesn't exist! Goofy.
I use vim 6.0 as my default text editor, and vim also does not show these DOS terminators, therefore my puzzlement as to why it didn't work! So, I opened up subscriptions.pl in plain ol' OpenBSD default vi, and voila! - a pretty little ^M at the end of every line.
Run dos2unix, strip out the ^Ms, and everything works as designed.
Nutty, eh? <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />
Thanks, guys, for neat software that can really take a pounding! <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" />
