We currently don't have "use warnings" in the code and turning them on will generate a lot of warnings that are useless to us

You know, these warnings are not there to make your life harder. It's not that perl takes your code as seed for a PRNG and then generates warnings from that PRNG. Every single warning generated has a reason, and most time, it is bad code or a possible error.

making it hard to locate the important ones.

If your code is such a mess, start by temporarily disabling the most frequent warnings - see warnings, or remove them by filtering STDERR, if you can't easily fix them.

Alexander