I am all for writing Perl programs - I do it myself all the time. It's just that the sequence of tasks in question is a perfect example of something that can be done quickly & simply in shell, and not so easily in Perl. I'm not saying you're wrong, because you're not. It's easier to learn a language if you have a motivation, something that you need to accomplish. But in this case I think he'd be struggling with it days after starting, when he'd have a tool he could use that would make his life easier in a few minutes using the shell language of his choice.