Okay -- but one needs to be careful about those quotes on the command line. In bash (or any bourne-like shell, whether on *nix or wintel), having the double-quotes on the outside (around the script) means that strings in the script that begin with "$" could be interpolated by the shell as environment variables (which might yield empty strings).

The problem doesn't apply in this particular case, because shell variable names have to start with an alphanumeric ("$1" etc are shell variables); as a general rule, bourne-shell users habituate toward single quotes around perl one-liners on the command line. (I suppose with "command.com", the behavior may be different.) (update: for those, like Browser UK, who didn't know, "command.com" is the DOS/Windows executable that is the standard DOS command-line interface)