I'm in the process of writing it, haven't compiled it yet and the thought came to me, there must be a way to compress this down such that I don't need to cut/paste/tweak the same 6 lines.

I personally believe that you should take those six lines and put them into a sub. Possibly put the sub into a module. I must admit that didn't follow the whole discussion because it looked like a mess, but this is a general purpose piece of advice that should apply to any situation in which you have the feeling you're copying and pasting too much.