Sounds like a fun project with lots of pain. :-)

How about about patching 'bash' to show what is done? There might even be some debugging stuff in there already, which could be used?

Then you could get a log of: 

 Line X:   run program "a" and store output into "b".
 Line X+1: Do something if $? == c

[download]
It should make it easier to generate Perl code and you could get the return codes, etc.

Hmm... could generate Perl programs that just did "system" calls and then rewrite them by parts.

In reply to Re^2: RFC: UNIX shell to Perl converter by BerntB
in thread RFC: UNIX shell to Perl converter by cdarke

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.