tilly, I believe my audience for this article will be both easily frightened by Script Magic and also impressed by little tricks. The more the code looks like English, the happier my editor will be.

I didn't use $! because I didn't want to have to explain that particular piece of magic.

I kept "unless" because it really is a neat feature of Perl, and it made the code more readable. (Or at least I think so.) Note that I translate the "unless" statement in the comments at the bottom.

And again, thank you *very* much for your help.