A good thing to try is to run perltidy over your code with various settings. Find a setting that you like and apply it regularly to your code. It keeps the style consistant which in the long run makes it easier to manage. Its defaults are also IMO fairly well chosen, so you arent going to annoy too many people if you just go with them.

Although I recognize this is a different use of style than you meant, i thinks its worth keeping in mind.

BTW, sometimes its worth recognizing that some tasks are always going to look ugly. Its hard to do much with a spec that is riddled with special cases and exceptions. So sometimes when the code looks ugly, well, there may be good reasons for it :-)