Unless you absolutely need to, use a shell script for this task instead of Perl. Or, spend the time to build an infrastructure in Perl that will stand you in good stead. I worked on scheduling tools (Control-M primarily, though some Tivoli and SQL*Server Scheduler) for 6 months on a contract and that's what we ended up doing. Devoted a month to it and did a year's worth of work every month after that. That's not counting the work we didn't even think was possible that was now a piece of cake.