As you've been told, you can't change your parent process's environment. If you don't mind having an extra shell process sitting around, however, you can exec '/bin/sh'.

Another possibility is outputting shell commands from your perl script and eval'ing that output in your shell.

Unless you have a really good reason—like you have real complex things you want to do to your environment—you're probably better off just sourcing a shell script.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";