You have already heard from better Perl programmers than I, but I do have a good deal of experience with programming in other languages.

My advice is what they said. In any programming language, in my experience, the more lines of code in a program the harder it is to debug and maintain. Besides exhaustive testing, rigid standardization of variables, file names, etc. is somewhat helpful. And standardization of variables and file names helps with maintaining close-coupled programs as well. Do the small, individual programs that do one job well. You won't be sorry.

HTH

xenchu