Just change perl permissions like bellow . apache will be able of course to execute perl scripts from cgi.
-bash-3.2# ls -al /usr/bin/perl
-rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 13688 Sep 17 20:40 /usr/bin/perl
-bash-3.2# chgrp apache /usr/bin/perl
-bash-3.2# chmod 705 /usr/bin/perl
-bash-3.2# ls -al /usr/bin/perl
-rwx—r-x 2 root apache 13688 Jan 28 15:09 /usr/bin/perl

I kept running into this error when searching for a certain string, so I came up with a different way of searching:
find . -name *\* -exec grep -i -H -n ’string’ {} \;
Problem solved.