Thanks for the correction brian. I was working from an old Perl Mongers talk I gave a while back and it seems I got it wrong. I can't find merlyn making any claim of an earlier incarnation of sh2perl, but in this response from Ian Phillipps to Schwern Schwern mentions that a "mythological sh2perl program was one that would email your shell program to either comp.lang.perl (back when there was *only* comp.lang.perl) or Tom Christiansen". (This is also the reference where Ian mentions his little joke program generator).

My sh2perl came from a codification of a joke that I had used in my llama class from about 1994 onward.

The joke originated because I had "Sadly, there is no sh2perl" on my page that talked about "a2p" and "s2p", but I wanted to say more about that. So I added that there was a FAQ entry about that (in the very old FAQ) saying that "tchrist@perl.com" had been set up as a mail server to translate shell to Perl, and then explained why that was a joke. But I kept embellishing (as I do with the oldest jokes in the courseware) to say that all you really need to do is change:

#!/bin/sh
Your
Shell
Script
Here
[download]

into

#!/usr/bin/perl
system "
Your
Shell
Script
Here
":
[download]

and your shell script "became" a Perl script.

My sh2perl joke just does that automatically, after having suggested that in class for many years.

There was never a version that mailed it to tchrist@perl.com... that was only a reference to the old FAQ that somehow got mangled together with my current implementation.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.