in reply to UNIX shell scripts + pipes

You could use pipes from the looks of it
# $@ being the shell's quoted argument list perl program1 $@ | perl program2
Also you may want to make your perl scripts executable for clarity's sake.

Another thing to note is when you're piping into a perl program the output from the source program will be on STDIN e.g

# program1.pl ... print while(<SOMETHING>); # program2.pl (which is reading program1.pl's output) ... while(my $line = <STDIN>) { do_something($line); }
There's also the handy -n switch and many others of whose information you can find in the perlrun manpage.
HTH

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broquaint