...I'm in agreement with Paulster2 here. My initial reaction was that this response does contain accurate and sound advice. But the fact that it came from an AM, and the fact that it ultimately offered no direct practical positive suggestions really stepped out of the spirit of PM for me.

I gave up on clpm a long time ago because all questions there were pretty much greeted with a cheerful RTFM, and I could get that by just hanging around with my geek friends. (Many of whom learned Perl from me.)

Simply telling someone to read the documentation that came with the package isn't really practical as significant good advice. A pointer to the specific section, and perhaps a small example of the sort of thing that is involved in the problem would be best (IMHO).

I do agree with the reaction that this question didn't reflect much prior effort on the part of the poster, nor did it show any evidence of experimental attempts to solve the problem. On the other hand, a reasonable response would be to offer a couple of experiments to try, and encourage the poster to return here with her results for further discussion.

When we keep them in the game with us by encouraging them cheerfully, they learn and then return here to answer questions for others. The community can live on. And that's why we do this. It's why we sign our names to our work.