I also made my own perl Shell (I called it Dish). It uses readline and curses so it is probably way too advanced for DOS. Its also not complete. I've given up on it for now, but here is the code in case someone else wants to give it a go. My problem was getting things like color ls to work with curses.

My website with my code is at http://www.hld.ca/opensource/Dish
Its GPL'd so no worry's about licenses :) ...no sarcasm here :)