Yes. So long as you only want to modify ls -l. And don't care about column alignment. The original author wants output to look like:

    -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  16,596,907,252 24 Dec  2009 boskoop.disk0.bz2 
    -rw-r--r--  1 grog  wheel   4,173,914,809 20 Jul  2006 boskopp.tar.gz 

With your perl one-liner on my directory I get mis-aligned columns:

    -rw-r--r--     1 dalke  staff  3,236,397,056 Sep 13  2011 pubchem.fps
    -rw-r--r--     1 dalke  staff   712,181,172 Sep 13  2011 pubchem.fps.gz

That's ugly. It should be:

    -rw-r--r--     1 dalke  staff  3,236,397,056 Sep 13  2011 pubchem.fps
    -rw-r--r--     1 dalke  staff    712,181,172 Sep 13  2011 pubchem.fps.gz