your perl script needs a serious rewrite: first of all always use strict and use warnings

For the colors problem is not a Perl's one: is the dumb cmd.exe that is unable to understand ANSI sequences.

Fortunately for me and for you ansicon by Jason Hood is able to render them.

IIRC you can have it installed via ansicon -i whic hook in the command processor adding a registry key (see readme on github):

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]

.. other entries here..
"AutoRun"="(if %ANSICON_VER%==^%ANSICON_VER^% \"c:\\path\\to\\ansi166\
+\x86\\ansicon\" -p)"
[download]

the -p option enable the parent process (ie cmd.exe) to use colors

L*