Click here to see what the ever amazing CPAN has to offer on the subject of VMS and DCL. systemexecpipe opens and backticks my $output = `run command` all let you access the native shell from perl.
Note that, because of case issues, that list isn't complete. (search.cpan.org has problems with archives where the files in the archive don't match the packages within those files in case) There's more here, as well as in the directories of some of the other authors pulled up by that search.