A few other monks have tried to answer your question or have followed up with questions of their own, so I'll submit my request for more clarity along with theirs...

Assuming that you are referring to MS-DOS, I am confused by you wanting to "use DOS on Solaris".

Solaris is a flavor of Unix. It is an operating system with a command line prompt, as is DOS. They both have the command 'cd'. That would be where the similarities start to stretch considerably.

Some might call refer to DOS as Bizzaro-Unix. Even the solidus (a.k.a. slash) is backwards!

But seriously folks... You don't use DOS on Solaris - that would be redundant-ridiculous. (Of course, you could run Solaris under VMWare on Windows...)

The Perl programming language is extremely expressive and is a natural compliment to any operating system. You can do a lot more with a lot less code with Perl than with either DOS batch scripts or even with Unix shell scripts. Perl runs on the Windows platform as well as Unix variants, so what you learn to do on one platform you can reuse on others.

It is a natural reaction to distrust what is new and to be resistant to learning new things. This is a human trait. Even people enamored with technology find that they have a hard time giving it up when the New thing comes along to replace it. Change is Scary.

You have however, come to the right place if you are starting on your journey as a Perl developer. There is no shortage of expertise here and you will not find it's like again elsewhere. My advice is to make liberal use of Super Search to help you learn, and only when you find yourself truly stuck - to then humbly ask the advice of the monks again. You may find your reception more to your liking.

Whoever is 'forcing' you to use Perl is giving you the opportunity of learning something new and powerful. Look upon it as a gift rather than a curse and you will in time be rewarded.