Yes, that helps a lot. The fact that Perl uses braces rather than whitespaces also makes it work much better in this situation.

I still wouldn't touch Perl with a bargepole, though. Sorry not sorry.

Totally agree. On a related note, I came across a similar thing just the other day for rubyists:

https://github.com/thisredone/rb

Probably not as fast as many of the individual unix tools it could replace, but does look like a great way to leverage one's knowledge of ruby.