Certainly one thing that's going for you here is that ... your very-first script was “useful!” That's the name of the game:   to solve practical problems, which Perl of course does very well.

Frankly, though, I'm not sure that you really want to be creating these symlinks; nor that you need to. It's just fine to be plinking-around with Leopard, and you won't do any harm (as long as you are not fiddling-around with root!) (nyet! nyet! nyet!) but this is probably not the most-desirable approach to be taking here.

One of the mantras in Perl-land, even to the point of having its own lengthy acronym, is:   “There's More Than One Way To Do It.”

Perl definitely beats the heck over AppleScript as a general-purpose scripting tool in the OS/X environment ... which, of course, is “why it is there.” Having said that, I don't mean to imply that the two are, or are meant to be, entirely comparable. But Perl is definitely “a tool to get to know.”

Welcome to Perl!