I may as well stick my two penn'th in.

RTFM'ing would be fine for a good in depth script, but it seems that for a quick one off script (as it appears that this was), you already understood the syntax, differences et al of the unix system i.e. a shell script could probably do the trick just as easily.

If you need to use Perl, then why not just do a system() call to do the job. This isn't very Perlish I know, but when it all goes horribly wrong and lots of people are breathing down your neck to fix it NOW, they won't give two wotsits how you've coded it, just that the problem is now fixed.

Of course this does imply that you've RTFMed the unix manual and know the difference between soft and hard links.

So yes, RTFM, just make sure it's the right one!