Coincidentally a friend called me up last night to look at his ppp dialer which was barfing, after I got ppp working he logged in and said "let me just run this script to fix up the time" and he had a perl script, nist.pl, for time synchronisation, you can find it here http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~aoc22/

For the reasons AgentM and extremely have suggested in this thread its fitness for purpose is questionable but it does makes me wonder if there isn't an adage that says "if it can be done in Perl... it probably already has" :-)

--
my $chainsaw = 'Perl';