The anonymous monk is right. I tend to output columns tab- separated including a column header row. In general there will be 0, 1 or more data rows in such situations. A bash script can read this in directly although given that the perl scripts are new, so must the interfacing be; so I would be inclined to do as much as possible in Perl and avoid new functionality in the bash as much as possible, although the implication is that dispensing with bash completely is not likely to be the preferred option.