The way I've done it is I have an alias in the shell that sources a file that's created by the perl script:

apocalypse$ which c
c is an alias for . ~/bin/mychdir

$ cat ~/bin/mychdir
#
~/bin/finddir $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9
cd "`cat $HOME/.targetdir`"
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The benefit is that it stays within the same shell, which means my history and background jobs are all still there.