Perl is awesome for it's one-liner abilities, but you still have to dance around the shell quoting issues, which can vary from shell to shell. Remembering exactly what needs to be escaped and how can get sufficiently tedious to just put the script into a file instead.

That said, there are some nice constructs such as:

  q(some string);      # same as a single-quoted string
  qq(another $string); # double-quoted string.
  qx();                # backticks, or $() in bash.