Is there a way to turn on tracing in perl (equivalent to bash -x)?

Take a look at Devel::Trace or Devel::ebug.

Given this program named w.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $answer = 42;

if ($answer == 6 * 9) {
    print "everything is running fine.\n";
} else {
    warn "there must be a bug somewhere...\n";
}

You can use Devel::Trace to watch the execution:

perl -d:Trace w.pl

Which produces the following output:

>> w.pl:6: my $answer = 42;
>> w.pl:8: if ($answer == 6 * 9) {
>> w.pl:11:     warn "there must be a bug somewhere...\n";
there must be a bug somewhere...