How can Perl's print add a newline by default?

Perl 6 has the say function that automatically appends \n.

You can also use say in Perl 5.10 or 5.12 if you add

use feature qw(say);

to the beginning of your program. Or you can use Modern::Perl to get this and other features.

See perldoc feature for more details.

You can use the -l option in the she-bang header:

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

$text = "hello";

print $text;
print $text;

Output:

hello
hello

If Perl 5.10+ is not an option, here is a quick and dirty approximation. It's not exactly the same, since say has some magic when its first arg is a handle, but for printing to STDOUT:

sub say {print @_, "\n"}

say 'hello';