Perl is a far more powerful programming tool than any shell script. Sometimes you want to borrow some of that power without having to rewrite your entire shell script. There is an easy way to integrate Perl snippets inside your shell script.

In the following example we encapsulate a Perl script inside of a Korn shell function. The Perl script outputs the value of Perl $email variable. We then assign the value of this Perl variable to a shell variable by executing the function:

#!/bin/ksh
perl_email() {
/usr/bin/perl << 'EOF'
use EmailClient;
my $obj = EmailClient-new;
my $email = $obj-getData( -field = 'email' );
print "$email";
EOF
}
SHELL_EMAIL=$(perl_email)