Perl postinst script running external commands

[Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>]

I have a perl postinst script that "gets stuck" when running certain
external commands.  For example, the line

`/etc/init.d/apache restart  >/dev/null 2>&1 3>&1 4>&1 5>&1`;

will freeze the postinst script so that it must be killed.  The problem
has something to do with using the debconf module,

use Debconf::Client::ConfModule ':all';

because the previous external command will execute just fine without
that use declaration.

So, I'm wondering if it's a bad idea for a postinst script to be written
in perl, and if I should extract the necessary perl functions and use
them from a #!/bin/sh postinst script.  I haven't yet found a Debian
package with a postinst script written it perl.

-- 
People said I was dumb, but I proved them!