I prefer to avoid forcing users to specify arguments in a particular order to avoid accidentally screwing up their source files, and I prefer to not have to write more control structures than necessary (such as to allow rearranging of arguments). Of course, if there's no way to do this with Getopt, "necessary" might turn out to be what writing more control structures becomes.

In any case, this isn't just about making this one trivial script work better: it's about learning how to use what's available in Perl. The example script is just what got me to this point.