I used to feel guilt about tinkering about finding solutions in this manner until I found this in the Sed & Awk book, I feel it's sentiments apply equally to Perl:

<quote>"For some people, myself included, the satisfaction of solving a problem is the difference between work and drudgery. Given the choice of using vi or sed to make a series of repeated edits over a number of files, I will choose sed, simply because it makes the problem more interesting to me. I am refining a solution instead of repeating a series of keystrokes."</quote>

To summarise: go forth and hack with impunity!

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