prevent xargs from quitting on error
You could wrap the perl script with another simple bash script:
#!/bin/bash
real-command "$@" || exit 0
This will call real-command passing it all the parameters that you pass to this fake-command and it will always return a 0 exit code (that means it is always successful) and xargs will never stop with this.
Similar to larsks answer but more explicit:
xargs sh -c "somecommand || true"