Let's see.. For each of these scripts progX.pl, we want to execute what's in them.. sort of.
By your example, you are not passing args to code in prog&*.pl files???
Thus the notion of "doing away with subs"?

If so, you can "execute" the code by..

# General.pl
require './prog1.pl'
require './prog2.pl'
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# prog1.pl
print "I am from prog1.pl\n";
1;
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# prog2.pl
print "I am from prog2.pl\n";
1;
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