passing env to child processes

[John Hundley]

Is there a way to ensure the environment gets passed on to child processes
from Perl?  I am having a bit of trouble with this.  I thought this was done
automatically but I guess not.  I tried a simple test by creating a shell
script that sets up some environment variables then calls a Perl script that
in turn calls another shell script which simply runs the env command.  This
last script is not inheriting the environment of the initial shell script as
I had hoped.
Thanks,
J