Of course, shell scripts spend most of their time running other commands. Commands like echo, awk, and cut are no more a part of ksh than perl is.

So go ahead and use ksh:

#!/bin/ksh

/usr/bin/perl -we '
for(1..10) {
print "Perl and ksh can work together\n";
}'
[download]

At least the manager isn't considering doing things in the shell which Sun helped popularize: csh!