The answer to the question "how do you interpolate a method call into a double quoted string in Perl" seems to be "not easily". This ones be exercising my googling for a short while now. I think I'll go for printing the method call outside the string for the time being.

Just had a look at a colleagues Huawei E160 mobile broadband dongle. Plugged it into my FreeBSD 7.2 s10e ideapad and it was seemingly recognised (at least I could see both a umass disk and crucially a ttyU0 usb-serial device, which I guess is the modem). I'm tempted. Didn't try to make it dial up though - I'd need to refresh on ppp first.