You could save some fiddly typing by using ASCII values with chr in a map to generate your character ranges. I would generate the "salt" for crypt on the fly from the documented allowed characters rather than your mysterious $never_blank_value.

johngg@shiraz ~/perl/Monks $ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
my @saltChars = map chr, 46 .. 57, 65 .. 90, 97 .. 122;
my @passChars = map chr, 50 .. 57, 97 .. 107, 109, 110, 112 .. 122;
my $salt      = join q{}, map $saltChars[ rand @saltChars ], 1 .. 2;
my $password  = join q{}, map $passChars[ rand @passChars ], 1 .. 8;
my $crypted   = crypt $password, $salt;
say qq{Salt       : $salt};
say qq{Password   : $password};
say qq{crypt()ed  : $crypted};'
Salt       : pI
Password   : x3ds5fey
crypt()ed  : pIS1tIDqATjmQ
[download]

Running this a few times produces

Salt       : mQ
Password   : jxaijfqu
crypt()ed  : mQf.VRB0dpcbk
[download]

Salt       : /5
Password   : h7si8gh9
crypt()ed  : /5.1Gj12mBfQY
[download]

Salt       : Tp
Password   : yjqyaikk
crypt()ed  : Tp/YoIkhaUEOE
[download]

I hope this is helpful.

Update: Fixed missing </code> tag.