Apache configuration: Exclude Perl-execution for a single directory

My attempt to distribute the Huawei B593 exploit-tool failed yesterday. Apparently people could not download the source-code and got a HTTP/500 error instead.

The reason for the failure was, that the Apache HTTPd actually executed the Perl-script as CGI-script. Naturally it failed miserably due to missing dependencies. Also the error output was not very CGI-compliant and Apache chose to dis-like it and gave grievance as output. In the meantime, my server actually has runnable Perl-scripts, for example the DNS-tester. The problem now was: how to disable the script-execution for a single directory and allow it for the virtual host otherwise?

Solution:
With Google I found somebody asking something similar for ColdFusion (who uses that nowadays?), and adapted it to my needs. I created .htaccess with following content:

<Files ~ (\.pl$)>
    SetHandler text/html
</Files>

Ta daa! It does the trick! It ignores the global setting, and processes the Perl-code as regular HTML making the download possible.