every other script langauge has a call for this.. perl being the system tool it is, how is this even possible? i am disappointed there is no pure perl solution in the core :/

I didn't say there wasn't one (I don't have the information to accurately answer that question), but I was merely asking why you have such a restriction. If there is some technical reason, perhaps it can be mitigated another way.

If you don't have a shell, how is your program running? If you don't know what commands are available on the host, how can you assume that any program/shell/script/whatever is available? There is no cure-all for every environment or platform.

One thing that perl does that I think is a great thing, is that it doesn't re-invent the wheel all of the time. If there is a command that exists on all version of a particular platform (like ls, cp, etc), it doesn't try to create it's own version. You have to make some assumptions to expect any script to work on any particular system. (is perl installed, is it the correct version, do I have access to /bin, is my script executable, or whatever) You can check for these assumptions, but if you want a script to execute on _any_ environment regardless of what you have access to, what exists on the box, or anything, then I'd imagine it would be rather difficult and/or tedious.