I looked hard but the work I did in perl-fu a year or two ago is on an archival cd somewhere in the closet.. sorry.

But I had no problem doing masking and stuff I remember. I made a little shell with readline that would let me type a series of perl-fu commands and once I was sure it worked, I would dump it into my script. This was the only way I found to debug the stuff.

My memory is as fuzzy as your border but.. Why not try and show the window and see what's happening? My system when run would show hundreds of windows popping open and closed, it was great. At least this will help you see if maybe the slash in your filename is tripping you up.. (does the modification date change?)

Similarly you could make a new window, copy the image into it and be sure it is displayed so you know it is opening up correctly. Baby steps..

By the way the shell was based on pgshell, you can search for it or just roll your own, it is only a handful of lines. I'd capture a bunch of lines and then after typing an end (maybe a period by itself) it would execute them all.