You made my point for me, which was "Where do you draw the line in overkill?". Using a standard module to the extent it can be used is, very often, the difference between ease of porting and a month's rewrite (q.v. nodes to that effect on this site).

We are in agreement on the standard template for a given operation, regex or not. The point I was trying to make is that, just as regexen are first-class citizens, so are CPAN modules, especially those modules that are in the core. Although 99% of those using File::Basename will never need to port to VMS, the 30-40% of us who work in the Win/*nix world are very happy to not have to worry about '/' vs. '\'. That's why I promote solutions that use the modules that are both in the core and in the list of commonly-accepted modules. (DBI, CGI::Application, HTML::Template, Template, *::Utils, Text::xSV, etc.)