Is there a good reason why the perl script doesn't use DBI and connect to Oracle directly? Whatever sql script is being passed to sqlplus could simply be run through DBI instead.

This would require putting information into the script that is needed for making the connection to oracle, but you need to do that anyway to run sqlplus.

(I'm not asking for the sake of being dogmatic. If there is a good reason for using sqlplus from a perl script, rather than using DBI, others at the Monastery would benifit from knowing some details.)