Thanks for the port. :) It's not that I wrote a shell script; it was all done interactively. What I posted here was a reconstruction from looking at the shell history.

I don't think the 'eval' version is working properly, bacause the second time you call eval for the same module, it becomes effectively a no-op. You can make perl forget that it already included a module by deleting its entry from %INC (for example, delete $INC{'CGI.pm'}). That doesn't clean up the package, however, which sometimes leads to spurious warnings, and some modules may do strange things when their initialization code is run twice. It is trickier to delete the dependencies as well, to return to a "blank slate", but it should be possible. Maybe there's even a CPAN module for that. ;-)