Add this section to httpd.conf.  Put it after a closing </Directory> near the bottom of the file.

--------------start-------------
# This directory section added 1/7/2 to enable
# .htaccess files in user directories...
<Directory "/export/home/*/public_html">
    Options All
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>
--------------end-------------

Note you'll need to change /export/home/*/public_html to /home/*/public_html or something.

In ~/public_html make a .htaccess file:
--------------start-------------
AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .cgi
AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .pl
Options ExecCGI +Includes Indexes
--------------end-------------

In ~/public_html make a hi.cgi (or hi.pl):
--------------start-------------
#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI qw(:standard);

print header;
print start_html(), h1("Hello"), end_html();

exit(0);
--------------end-------------

You can test hi.cgi with this command:
chmod a+x hi.cgi; ./hi.cgi ''
It should output some HTML.  If you're prompted for input just do a CTRL-D.


File permissions should look like this:
bash-2.03$ ls -la
total 18
drwxr-xr-x   3 payne    staff        512 Jan  7 18:46 .
drwxr-xr-x  10 payne    staff       1024 Jan  8 08:22 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 payne    staff        183 Jan  7 18:43 .htaccess
-rw-r--r--   1 payne    staff         36 Jan  7 17:59 index.html
-rwxr-xr-x   1 payne    staff        110 Jan  7 18:37 hi.cgi