One of Perl's biggest strengths is the reach and depth of the modules that come with Perl/available on CPAN.

I prefer to use modules as much as possible for several reasons:

• I don't have time to reinvent the wheel
• I don't know as much about the problem as the module author
• I am not as good a programmer as the module author
• I'd rather work in an engineering mindset than an artisan mindset

Even in small tasks I try to make use of modules as much as possible.

For example, you can use a regex to break a filename out of a *nix path. But if you use File::Basename, your code now can handle Win32, MacOS, VMS, and AmigaOS pathnames.

That's a good thing when need to run a Perl based utility on several OSes.