Sure, Perl's grep built-in function is very powerful, in fact generally much more powerful than Unix' egrep (to tell the truth, they are not used exactly the same way, Perl's grep works on a Perl array, not exactly the same thing as Unix's egrep working usually on files or data flow), in part because Perl's regexes are incredibly good (and far beyond the "official" definition of regular expressions).

In your case, I am fairly sure that Perl's grep function should do what you want much more efficiently than a system call to egrep, but I am not very clear on what you are really trying to achieve, so I can't help further for the time being. Please specify what you need.