One learns most by reaching beyond one's grasp.

I post code like this so that beginners can quickly see that there are tools for most things, even if they can't grok the code at once.

I am very glad that you posted the breakdown (although my goal was that the OP would "unpack" it him/herself) as it is surely important to understand what's really going on. Your demo is very important. My angle is honed by having worked with, hired, etc. too many Perl programmers who are so unfamiliar with standard modern tooling that they write krufty hand-rolled code that's hard to maintain.

I hope to inspire beginners to always be considering that there may be a better tool for some functionality than trying to reinvent the wheel (even if reinventing a couple is a necessary beginning step).