You can run bash thru IPC::Open3. Here is a super simple example. You can add alot more complexity by doing a Select on the output filehandles.

#!/usr/bin/perl 
use warnings;
use strict;
use IPC::Open3;

$|=1;

#my $pid=open3(\*IN,\*OUT,\*ERR,'/bin/bash');
my $pid=open3(\*IN,\*OUT,0,'/bin/bash');
# set \*ERR to 0 to send STDERR to STDOUT

my $cmd = 'date';

#send cmd to bash
print IN "$cmd\n";

my $result = <OUT>;
print $result;
[download]