Thank you for all of your input. Until futher notice, I will just use SAS to process a CGI created file.
On an unrelated note, I thought that Microsoft Word, Excel, etc were propority formats, yet OpenOffice works with them. So in theory the obstacle of a SAS properity data format is breakable...right?
There are a number of projects ongoing to reverse engineer the sas7bdat dataset format. One open opensource project that is written entirely in R code can be found at
http://biostatmatt.com/R/sas7bdat_0.2.tar.gz
This would be easily ported to Perl I would think.