Good point - to answer the question, the ksh could be said to be more like Perl than Java, but sadly to take advantage of that would be an extremely bad idea:

To gain all the advantages for Perl I would want to claim, the Perl should be written like Perl, taking all the advantages I and others have pointed out. If I were to encourage the fastest conversion from ksh to Perl, this would produce very bad Perl code indeed.

To give an example, there is code that uses gdate to produce dates in the format YYYYMMDD and a program called add_days that prints the date that results from adding or subtracting a specified no. of days. Rather than shell out to either of these programs, the Perl implementation should have its own date routines that conform to the application system standards while transparently using CPAN modules as appropriate without any shelling out taking place. The last thing I would want to do is have some manager planning a code conversion that makes the Perl code shell out just because it was the shortest and cheapest route from the original ksh code.