Any time I invoke anything on the OS via 'system' or backticks or any other way, I'd be worried that the program being called may not be in the path of the user running the script.

If you prefer running your one-liner as an OS command from inside a script, why not run it from a shell script then?

#!/usr/bin/sh

/usr/bin/perl -ne 'print if $. >=17 && $. <= 39' infile.txt >outfile.t
+xt
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