Sounds like what you are trying to do is take the file contents, returned from the cat bash command, pipe it to gpg to create an un-encrypted password in a new file. At least, that's what the *nix syntax looks like.

If this is the case, I believe you can do this pretty simply by reading in the file using a standard open() and pipe it to gpg similarly to how you are doing it through your command line.

So...

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

# First, open the file and read the contents... assuming one line
open my $file, 'encrypted_file_name' or die "ERROR:\t$!\n";
my $enc_pass = shift( @{ [ <$file> ] } );
close $file;

# Next, pipe the contents to gpg
open my $gpg_command, "/usr/bin/gpg --option newfile oldfile | "
my $gpg_out;
while ( <$gpg_command> ) {
  $gpg_out .= $_;
}
close $gpg_command;

print "$gpg_out\n";

exit;
[download]

Given the syntax of your command line interface to gpg, this should do the exact same thing, though via perl.

NOTE: I didn't test this being that I don't know what you are really trying to do here. This is really more of an idea seed that will start pointing you in the right direction!

Good luck!!

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