I've ran into so many problems copying files (esp during a 'make') that I now do the equivalent of the following for each executable ...

rm -f dest
cp src dest
chmod ugo+rx dest
[download]

Which handles cases where dest already exists, src and/or dest are owned by someone else and may already have wrong permissions set, or dest is already in use (and some OSs complain if you try to overwrite it). This isn't perfect (esp for NFS) so YMMV.

The problem I have with using pure perl to replace common Unix commands is that I need to spend the time and test to make sure my assumptions are correct about how they work and I need to be able to spend the time to pursue a fix/workaround if they don't work like I expect. If the module is not in Perl's core I need to go to additional trouble (e.g. Do I really want to spend the effort on a module at version 0.01 which hasn't been upgraded in 3 years?).

bluto