perldoc and perl wrapper

rhumbliner has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

i recently installed the newest version of mac osx (maverick) which did a clean install of perl. as usual, perldoc no longer works without setting the execute bits. i've always been mystified by this". reading the contents of /usr/bin/perldoc it says

The contents of this script should normally never run!  The perl wrapp
+er
should pick the correct script in /usr/bin by appending the appropriat
+e version.
You can try appending the appropriate perl version number.  See perlma
+cosx.pod for more information about multiple version support in Mac O
+S X.
[download]

what is this wrapper that perldoc refers too? why do i have to set the execute bits to get this to work?

tia.

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