Heh. It is certainly accepted by me ... PerlMonks is a dull place if nobody has a sense of humor. SOPW is sort of like an advice buffet -- take as much as you like of whatever suits you. :)

API simply stands for 'Application Programming Interface' and has to do with the external 'face' or 'handle' that one application presents to another who wants to use its functionality. So (in my hypothetical example) the event logging subsystem would conceal its complexity from its clients and present an easy way to log events by simply instantiating an EventLog object and calling some simple method. The EventLog.pm module might have all kinds of cool and intricate private methods that stored away the events in files and databases, but all that would be 'under the covers' and the scripts that called that method wouldn't have to know about it.

I like the sound of aufflick's idea, in that it might combine the best of both worlds -- working with shell scripts and having minimal impact on your existing scripts, yet being extensible in terms of parsing and reporting on the event messages once they've been mailed.