Not to be a heretic, but you could step outside of Perl
and just use the "shar" program to create a shell archive.
This utility already does near-exactly what you're trying to
do, and is (somewhat) common.
Here's the HP/UX "shar:"
usage: shar [-AabCcDdefhmorstuvZ] <file|dir> ...
-A: supress warning messages for optional acl entries
-a: assume files are shippable, don't uuencode
-b: use basenames instead of full pathnames
-c: use wc(1) to check integrity of transfer
-C: include a "cut here" line
-d: don't recurse on contents of directories
-D <dir>: must be in <dir> to unpack
-e: don't overwrite existing files
-f <file>: file containing list of directories and files
or - to read filenames from standard input
-h follow symbolic links instead of archiving them
-m: retain modification/access times on files
-o: retain user/group owner information
-r: must be "root" to unpack
-s: use sum(1) to check integrity of transfer
-t: verbose messages to /dev/tty instead of stderr
-u: assume remote site has uudecode(1) for unpacking
-v: verbose mode
-Z: shrink files using compress(1)
The GNU version is substantially similar.
If your "targets" don't have access to a POSIX-like shell,
though, they'd need one. (i.e. are they stuck on Windows?)
The Bourne Again Shell (bash) from Cygwin comes to mind...
For example:
(hpux) $ shar myfile.pl > myfile.shar
(nt) $ ftp (hpux)
Connected to (hpux)
220 (hpux) FTP server (Version 1.1.214.4 Mon Feb 15 08:48:46 GMT 1999)
+ ready.
Name ((hpux):(user)):
331 Password required for (user).
Password:
230 User (user) logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> ascii
200 Type set to A.
ftp> get sample.shar
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for sample.shar (138630 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
140877 bytes received in 0.14 seconds (1006264 bytes/s)
ftp> quit
221 Goodbye.
administrator@(nt) ~
$ head -3 sample.shar
# This is a shell archive. Remove anything before this line,
# then unpack it by saving it in a file and typing "sh file".
administrator@(nt) ~
$ sh sample.shar
Compiling unpacker for non-ascii files
x - myfile.pl
I've assumed a binary file here (ergo the line about non-ascii), but transfered it in ASCII mode, just to make sure that the translation before a 64-bit UNIX host and a 32-bit Win32 host would work OK even over an "unclean" link, like contained in an eMail message. Something like this should work for you, then:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
my $recipients = 'admin@site1 admin@site2';
open MAIL, "|mailx -s 'updated files' $recipients";
print MAIL<<HEADER_END;
Here are today's updated files.
Save the rest of this message to a file (for example, "updated.shar")
+and then run it in a shell (for example,
"sh updated.shar") to extract.
HEADER_END
print MAIL `shar @ARGV`;
print MAIL `cat ~/.signature`;
close MAIL;
