Usually, you want to do as much of your work inside your Perl program as you can. CPAN has a wealth of modules that accomplish many tasks, including those that you normally do very easily from the command line. In the cases where you can’t find a module, you might not be able to improve on the command-line siutation for complicated tasks. Perl is, after all, a glue language, so you don’t always have to do everything in Perl. When you decide to use an external program, there are many Perl features waiting to help, although you have to choose the right one for the job. Continue reading “Interact with the system when Perl isn’t enough”