I'm not quite clear exactly what you are trying to do, but if it is all possible, you should (in general) avoid calling shell scripts (and other non-portable commands) in your perl scripts. Instead, where possible, use modules that provide equivalent behavior.

That being said, you can easily run shell commands using the back-ticks operator `echo "blah"`, or the regex like quote operators qx{echo "blah"}. Output to STDOUT from the shell command is returned.

If that doesn't answer your question, perhaps you could clarify a bit, or post some example code?