I totally hear you on needing to see the code to answer anything specifically about where the problem might be. I'm unfortunately not in a position where I can post it in its entirety. Thanks, though.

Can you at least explain a little more clearly what the subroutines are doing? "a couple called as command line arguments that simply print data to the screen and exit" doesn't tell me much. How long does it take to run? How much time do you want to trim?

If what you need to do is speed up specific subroutines, have you looked for any code that can be pulled out of sub? Are you opening/creating/etc some resource that could be held open to remove that step?

Optimization questions are pretty hard to deal with unless you have at least some idea of the problem.

Surely. I don't think there's any problems in sharing the help menus:

sub help { # print basic help menu and exit.
  print "vpimport\n";
  print "version $VERSION\n";
  print "Format vendor price files for import to InOrder.\n\n";
  print "Usage: vpimport [--vendor <VENDOR>] [--pricefile <file>] "
      . "[--outfile <file>] [--pricesource <name>] [--live] "
      . "[--no-create] [--help].\n";
  print "--vendor <VENDOR>     The vendor code of the vendor to update
+.\n";
  print "--pricefile <file>    The name of the vendor's price file.\n"
+;
  print "--pricesource <name>  The price source to add/update.\n";
  print "--live                Use InOrder_Live instead of "
      . "InOrder_Development\n";
  print "--no-create           Don't create new inventory/vendor items
+.\n";
  print "--help                Print this help and exit.\n";
  print "--version             Print version and exit.\n";

  exit(0);
}
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sub version { #print version number and exit
  print "$VERSION\n";
  exit(0);
}
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These are called via command line options (I'm using Getopt::Long) in the following code:

my $result = GetOptions
  (
   "version" => \&version, # print version and exit.
   "help" => \&help, # print basic help and exit.
   "vendor=s" => \$vendor, # The vendor code to update for.
   "pricefile=s" => \$pFile, # The vendor price file we're reading.
   "pricesource=s" => \$pSource, # name of the new price list,
   "live" => \$useLive, # Are we using the live database?
   "no-create" => \$no_create, # Don't create new items.
  );
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