I would argue that's exactly why you should adopt this approach. As a new user, you should avoid using classic Perl "magic", and make sure your code is straight-forward and readable. The script, as I've presented it, loops over the passed file names (@ARGV), tests to make sure you've passed file names that can be found (-e), copies the files using a CORE module (File::Copy) and then modifies the file with an append (perlopentut). It tests if operations succeed and is warnings and strict compliant. I never use command line switches in any of my code unless I'm writing one-liners, and half that time it would have been faster just to write a proper script.