I thank you both for your helpful responses. I will be analyzing both of the methods to see what I can learn from them. From running a quick trial of both, I can tell that there are many routes I could take. I've only been using Perl for two days, so it will take a bit to absorb all of what is going on.

Yes, boxft, my aim is to start out away from cpan, mostly so that I can learn the ins and out of the language first, before adding all of that functionality. Start simple, build from there.

Thanks