First suggestion, make sure that your open worked.

Second is that I believe neither cat nor awk are Perl functions; you have to wrap them in a system call, qx or back quotes (`) for them to be executed. Better would be to translate the awk into Perl (use a2p, if needed) and replace cat, awk, and the shell program with a split, the few lines of Perl to replicate the script's functionality, and printf.