cbrackin I’m a bit confused with your interpretation of your task, you say that you are asked to :-

“create a Perl script” to do a certain task, you also say

"that the test is to see how I use resources to obtain the data/knowledge needed to simply get the job done"

Yet in the task spec it specifically says “Write a Perl script” any interpretation of that would be that

you have to write it and "not that I even have to do it myself"!