My syslogd man page says that the pipe symbol before the file name means writing to a named pipe, not executing a command. You could attach a Perl process to the other side of the named pipe. You could even run the Perl script like this and still read from stdin: 
./perlscript < /tmp/log-named-pipe

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In reply to Re: Outputting syslog to some perl code by iburrell
in thread Outputting syslog to some perl code by Binford

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