The code snippet posted will source this shell environment file prior to exec'ing the Perl script, that way it's available to the Perl code. We don't run these programs by hand, they run from a cron job, and we previously had to write a shell wrapper to perform the same function that the snippet does automatically for us. Plus, now any of our shell debugging tools and utilities are using the exact same environment settings as the actual Perl scripts that run the system. Which was the whole point.

I hope this makes sense.