I disagree with considering "Perl wrapping" as over-engineering. In my expirience if I have 2 or 3 lines of command line tasks that I do regularly I find it quite convenient to 'wrap' them in Perl. Why Perl you may ask? Primarily to avoid shell differences. I have found many of these full blown 3 line Perl scripts ( complete with -w and use strict ) often grow in functionality and are huge time savers. More often than not the fact that I can jump on a server and complete these task in one command does more for my image than the real 'meaty' tasks I accomplish. Additionaly I can easily add on some of my home brew modules that take care of cross-platform issues ( Like ls vrs dir and / vrs \ ). I also get the added bonus of keeping my Perl coding speed and familiarity brushed up.