Larry Wall says approvingly that Perl is often used for tasks where it is not the optimal tool. The reason is that programmers are lazy.

Let's say that Java is really the best tool for doing XML, but I do not know Java, I know Perl. If Perl's XML tools are almost as good as Java, and I can save weeks of learning time by programming my XML in Perl, then I will probably do my XML in Perl even though Java may be better.

If a pure cron solution requires too much knowledge of Unix internals and a Perl solution requires only Date::Calc and a simple daily cron job, then I say write a Perl script that cron will run daily, and let Date::Calc, which is available from www.cpan.org, do the date calculations.