how do i do this with pgp?

i'm writing a lot of perl scripts that need to interact with pgp. however, i have not found an easy way of getting a passphrase to pgp from a script. i realize of course that this is for security; pgp only wants things typed in from a keyboard. however, there are plenty of times when automated processing is desired, and security of the key does not need to be perfect. in these cases, the only way (it seems to me) to get pgp to work is to setenv PGPPASS, which is really terrible security. is there a better way to do this? will there be some easier way in future versions of pgp, like being able to read the passphrase from stdin? e