I'm brand spankin' new to Perl and am still having trouble picking up the syntax necessary to execute some basic data movement structures.

I assume you mean "some basic data structure movement". One keyword: splice. That lets you insert any number of items in an array at any point — optionally deleting a few. Now splice() isn't the simplest of commands in Perl, so maybe I should point you to one of my previous replies on the subject that, so I've been told, has been promoted to tutorial: Re: [splice], explanation please?