Unfortunately I'm not using perl Makefiles for this, at least not yet. I had to some degree pretty much dismissed the perl make system for this project, but I may need to go back and re-examine that decision. Ultimately, this project is not a perl script or a perl module - it's a complete software package that runs multiple daemons as root on the system and offers a few commandline tools for sysadmins as well (it's essentially the client side of a systems management/monitoring system of sorts, with some rather hardcore requirements in terms of scalability and precision).

I was doing something very similar to your File::Spec method earlier on, and it may ultimately be what I have to do in production. However, I was doing it "manually" without File::Spec, which resulted in ~8 lines of code instead of your 2-3 (it's significant to me, because that block of code basically has to be copy+pasted into every script in this system, there's no real sane way to modularize it and eliminate the redundancy that I've found). Tack on the "find the best perl interpreter" problem, and you've got a decent little block of code which must be pasted into BEGIN{} at the top of every script.

It looks like File::Spec 0.8 is when rel2abs() was introduced, and File::Spec 0.8 became part of the core in perl 5.5.x somewhere, so it should be cool for me to use it implicitly in the begin block like that. At least that shortens things up a bit