How can I convert my shell script to Perl?

    Larry's standard answer for this is to send your script to me (Tom
    Christiansen) with appropriate supplications and offerings.  :-(
    That's because there's no automatic machine translator.  Even if you
    were, you wouldn't gain a lot, as most of the external programs would
    still get called.  It's the same problem as blind translation into C:
    you're still apt to be bogged down by exec()s.  You have to analyze
    the dataflow and algorithm and rethink it for optimal speedup.  It's
    not uncommon to see one, two, or even three orders of magnitude of
    speed difference between the brute-force and the recoded approaches.