without trying it out, this looks plain wrong

 $result = '';

because it breaks your evaled string delimiter

perl -e ' ...

maybe try

  $result = q();

instead.

q/STRING/ is an alternative syntax for '' , see perlop#Quote-and-Quote-like-Operators for details

update

PS: please note that bash has here-docs too, maybe a more flexible way to safely integrate literal Perl code.

Personally, I'd do it the other way around, that is, just write the whole thing in Perl... but ok, embedding Perl into a longer shell script is ok too, I guess... ;-)

I'm assuming you're using bash, and you don't seem to need STDIN in your Perl script, so I'd probably use a here doc, like in the following. I've also made some tweaks, plus you didn't seem to be passing the Perl script any filenames. (Note: I tested without RTF::TEXT::Converter.)

function fConvert {
    perl -wMstrict -- - $@ <<'ENDPERL'
    use RTF::TEXT::Converter;
    my $result = '';
    my $object = RTF::TEXT::Converter->new( output => \$result );
    foreach my $filename (@ARGV) {
        $object->parse_stream($filename);
        print $result;
        $result = '';
    }
ENDPERL
}
[download]

Update: Or, just make it a oneliner ;-) (the module just prints its output by default)

perl -wMstrict -MRTF::TEXT::Converter -00ne
    'RTF::TEXT::Converter->new->parse_string($_)'
[download]

Update 2: I guess I should mention why I'd suggest a heredoc: when the delimiter is quoted (as in 'ENDPERL'), you don't have to worry about special characters within the heredoc.

On a tangent: RTF::TEXT::Converter is quite broken and has been abandoned for a long time; it will likely never be fixed; Unicode/UTF-8 incapable and has some surprise bugs like omitting lines that contain just a zero.

I would recommend checking out Pandoc. I haven't used it but have been planning to get to it soon and convert a bunch of my own code if it's as good as I expect.

Update: typo fixed.

Kudos for mentioning Pandoc.

But I'm wondering why it's necessary to use an intermediate Perl wrapper when starting a Haskell tool from Bash?

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

Surely not necessary. Just a nice normalizer, I suppose. Can't even build pandoc on my current work setup so... :(

It looks like LanX has the correct answer. After shell quoting, that line would be: $result = ; which surely isn't what you intended.

Also, you check @ARGV in the embedded script, but don't pass any arguments to it. You should add "$@" after the last single quote to pass the arguments to the function. i.e.:

function fConvert {
   perl -e '
   ...<snip>...
   ' "$@"
}
[download]