http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=41803

I'm currently working on a project at work that that involves running some programs which generate special assembler source files which are in turn compiled and run on two different internal simulators and compared to an expected output. Since there's a lot of dependancies, and many situations where we wouldn't need to recompile code (on different levels), "make" seemed like a good fit, although I hadn't used it before. In just a day of working with make, I realized that what it does (dependancies), it does very well. And everything else is so syntax burdened that it's nigh impossible to use elegantly.

What bothered me the most was that I felt like equivalent perl code would be less efficient because it lacked an easy way of tracking dependancies. Needless to say, I would much rather use Perl than make. Is there some way I can use perl to perform this dependancy checking shell scripting behavior in a far more elegant way than make?

-Ted