Also I like the idea of going all Perl or calling an entire Perl script. The trouble is we are an all UNIX shell shop and If I started throwing Perl scripts around it would blow peoples minds.
If you'd like to blow people's minds with specific reasons to write the whole thing in Perl see:

In reply to Re^3: assigning a perl variable in shell by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread assigning a perl variable in shell by scheidr

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