Update Twitter status programmatically with Perl and cURL

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Setup
$u="username";
$p="password";
$upd="Hello world!";

# Leave this as-is
$url="http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml";

# The actual command
$cmd = "/usr/bin/curl -u  $u:$p --data status=\"$upd\" $url";
system $cmd;