Slightly off-topic... If your institute of higher learning has a Computer Center (I'm a dinosaur; they probably don't exist anymore) or Computer Science Department, you might consider contacting them and seeing if they have anyone Perl-savvy who'd be willing to write your software for you. It's something an undergraduate programmer can put on his resume; your department might be able to provide a Work Study job for the guy, etc.

By the way, you're learning programming far better than I did bio-chemistry. 8-)