b3b0p - You're absolutely right to create something which interests you as a practice for your own skills. And it's perfectly possible that in doing so you might produce something which is indispensible to others.

However, one of the fundamental principles driving the perl community is 'laziness' (in a positive sense) and this more or less dictates that if someone has already produced a script which does the job perfectly well (eg a module on the CPAN), then don't try to reinvent the wheel (there are anyway almost always problems down the line which have already been ironed out in the modules)

So if you were to post a message saying that you are interested in creating a script to do this, that ot the other, the first thing to happen is that you would be grilled on the need to do it because there are x,y, or z modules on the CPAN. If you successfully argue your case then you would find a lot of support from the people at PM to help you achieve this. If not...

So carry on doing your own stuff to improve your skills an who knows, you may yet write that piece of software you dream of. And don't forget that if the community he created had been around at the time Larry Wall was writing Perl, he would probably have been given a pretty hard time about it himself!!

Sorry if this does not convince you otherwise ;)