Using this mentality I've got this to work:

sub exec_check {
    my (%check) = @_;
    my $script = './fh.tmp';
    open( my $out, '>', $script );
    print $out $check{'CHECK_CODE'};
    close($out);
    system("chmod 755 $script");
    my @return = qx/$script/;
    foreach (@return) {
        my ($status, $string) = split(";", $_);
        print_output($status, $string);
    }
    system("rm $script");
}
[download]

It still seems a bit inelegant, but maybe with as with so many perl things it's just as elegant as it's going to get :\