Using a one-liner and backticks, perl -e '{ .... }' `ls -l`, @ARGV will be loaded with the output from the ls command.

However, if you wanted to process each line in turn, you could use a one-liner ... ls -l | perl -ne '{ .... }' to read each line of the ls command, in turn, into $_ or alternatively ... ls -l | perl -ane '{ .... }' will read each line in turn and split it (the line) on whitespace, into @F.

HTH ,