in reply to cloning Sun's crypt

I don't know Sun's crypt program, and I don't know if someone made a perl version of it. My suggestion is to invoke the program from your perl script when you need it?
You can use system: here is an example from perlfunc man page:
@args = ("command", "arg1", "arg2"); system(@args) == 0 or die "system @args failed: $?"
Instead if you need to catch the crypt program output you can use a pipe open
$param1 = "some value"; $param2 = "some other value"; open (CRYPT, "crypt -$param1 -$param2 |") or die "error: $!"; while (<CRYPT>) { print; #here you can make any manipulation you need with the progr +am output } close (CRYPT);
Hope this helps.
marcos