No script output to stdout,stderr

[Brendan Gibson]

I am using a new installation of Red Hat Enterprise 4.  I have a problem
in that when I run a script from the command line I do not get any
output.

I have tried a shell script and a perl script, listed below:

shcheckout.sh:

#!/bin/sh
echo "Shhhh...."


checkout.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
print "I am a perl script\n";

I can run the scripts like

$ sh shcheckout.sh
Shhhh....

AND

$ perl checkout.pl
I am a perl script

However running them as

./shcheckout.sh 
AND
./checkout.pl

produce no output, but redirecting the output to a file works OK.

Does anyone know what's going on, and how to fix it?