Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to write a simple perl script to run on a FreeBSD machine.
There are alot of posts here, and I have read so many, yet can not get this script to run.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

-e 's/\r\n/~/' infile.txt outfile.txt

I am trying to take a windows text file, move it into Unix, run a script on it.
For starters, I only want this to replace the first carriage return/line feed with a ~
I do not want to convert it to Unix, just replace the first carriage return/line feed.
I have tried \r\n and also \015\012
The file is an ASCII text file, created in notepad.

I am getting errors about the \ and the /, therefore I also tried:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

-e 's:\r\n:~:' infile.txt outfile.txt

Yet no luck. It also seams to tell me it is looking for a operator before the infile.txt Also get Can't locate object method "txt" via package "outfile"
another error message:

Code:

Bareword found where operator expected at ./xyz.pl line 2, near "'s:\r\n:~:' infile.txt"

(Missing operator before infile?)


Any ideas?

Code:

perl -i.bak -pe 's/[\n\r]/~/' input_file

The "input_file having" the updated contents. the "input_file.bak" contains the orginal file contents.