in reply to External Dependencies on Unix Commands
you can always avoid aliases by giving the full path to the command. you can check to see if the command is where you think it is (and executable) with the -x file test.
of course, you should probably just try to do whatever you are doing with the commands inside your perl script instead. if you are having trouble implementing some behavior inside your perl script, this is the place to ask :)
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom