This question, as you posed it, is very difficult to answer.

You told us very little about what is being done outside of the fact that you are setting up an environment by sourcing shell scripts. You also haven't hinted as to why it is currently done the way it is which may well be important to know.

What do you mean by the phrase "use Perl to centralize the configuration settings" and what is necessary for a "proper shell environment for older scripts" in your case?

Generally, trying to use perl to set your environment isn't a great idea. The shell itself excels at it. On the other hand, you might be able to use perl to auto-generate your .profiles from a single centralized config file if they are little more than bunches of variable assignments anyway. Consolidating the logic in that way might be helpful.

I'm sure if you provide more information someone will be able to provide a more insightful response.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

I recently encountered this problem. I solved it by running (in backticks) the shell script followed by printenv, which prints all the environment variables, and looping through the output setting the environment with %ENV.