So you have Perl, but no modules. I suspect that you will soon begin to conclude the Perl is a pain to program with

I'll have to disagree here - while CPAN is incredibly useful, you're still going to be much more productive coding in perl than in C even without access to it, and by using the syscall() built-in you can achieve pretty much anything that you need for low-level system functions. It's much more work than using various perl modules from CPAN, but it should get you there.

Michael