yes, as I think a number of people have already said. You can probably do most of it with a shell script even, without Perl. You since you're on ubuntu, you can edit the /etc/rc.local file to launch your script at startup. You can then do your thing, write yourself a note on how many times you still want to reboot, then let the shell script move on to the next step and reboot. The reboot steps probably have to run as root, but the rest can probably run as anybody. I'd probably return a 1 or a 0 from the Perl script to tell the shell whether to reboot or just go along it's way.