First of all, it's not an issue of being familiar with eval or exec .. I know what those do, it's the some of the crazy syntax/variables it's trying to use in ways that make no sense.

Second, bash most certainly has an "eval" see the "SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS" section of "man bash"

Third, reading RedHat bug#82652 indicates a couple of important things:

• /etc/rc.d/init.d/hpoj is evidently a symlink to /usr/sbin/ptal-init
• The lines you quoted seem to come from a patch attached to ALEXANDRE's comment#7
• The same ALEXANDRE submitted another patch with comment#8 indicating that her first patch: "...isn't even correct perl."

I would read the rest of that bug, and take a look at the most recent release of your software.