Thanks for the tip about benchmark. But I don't agree one should abandon Perl just because one measures some snippet execution in milliseconds. What you are most missing here is that one of the main reasons to use Perl is to avoid shelling out (or in) at all, in the first place. So those milliseconds can and will be optimised away with Perl! Conversely it is much more of a challenge (if even remotely possible) to do so with scripting languages that are not based on C, especially re Perl access to C libraries.