In that case, look at it this way: you have your standard unix toolkit. grep, find, sed, sort and so on; and you've added to it a number of new tools. That's fine and your choice to make them seperate is completely reasonable. Now, suppose you were to write a solution for a slightly different task, one that didn't have anything to XML or your current problem set. Would you use /bin/sh? Would you use Perl? In many cases either one makes sense... now you just have to make sure your tools aren't clunky, so you can use them with the same ease as you'd use grep and friends in a shell script. Making it possible to use standard input and output helps -- you can certainly pipe perl scripts with one another.