It sounds like you're trying to do this the complicated way. Is there a good reason the perl script is running on a linux machine, updating your Excel, presumably on the Windows machine, or a shared drive? Did you know there are versions of Perl for Windows? Go look at http://www.activestate.com for one.

Also, I would suggest just using Perl for all of it, depending on what the rest of the VBA code is doing.

Anyhow. Calling perl installed on the Windows machine is realtively easy, use the VBA 'Shell' function to run the executable, and pass it whichever parameters you want with the script name. Calling perl on a remote machine involves knowing how you would do it by hand. You can either install it as a CGI, and use the HTTP VB objects to simulate surfing there. Or you attempt to run the perl executable 'by hand', by logging in remotely, with telnet for example. (VB might have a control for that, or you'll need the socket control).

You could also Shell out to plink.exe (part of the putty suite of ssh tools) and run a remote command that way. docs

Other than that, its hard to give advice.. To programmatically do something like this, you first have to know how you would do it by hand..

C.