I was thinking that it would be pretty trivial to embed Perl one liners in the shell script. This, on the other hand is just ... just .. well, I don't know. Not right. Not even wrong. It just is.

Hmmm. Barring something like this, or a perl one-liner, I can't think of any easy way to do it in one script that starts as a shell. The shebang (#!) is a one-time-deal, no changing type mid way though.

BTW, just for curiosity, could you have the base be a Perl program that called shell script stuff? The requirement to have shell and Perl in the same file is somewhat unusual.

=Blue
...you might be eaten by a grue...