http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1029809


in reply to calling awk one liner from perl

Hi vroom, sed and awk cannot handle large amount of data, because they try to load the entire file at once into the memory and then apply the changes on them. Even if you call a awk command from perl script same thing happen.

But here is an example that you can try:
$command = <awk command>; system($command);