Yes but...

Can't you just have a Makefile full of perl one-liners?

VMS and Win32 already do this to a certain extent, but...

• Its slow.

• State is lost between commands

• You still have to worry about shell escaping arguments

  • Different quoting rules.

  • Paths with spaces in them.

• Shells have exec length limits (as little as 255 bytes)

  • Cumbersome to pass large amounts of data (META.yml for example)

See ExtUtils::MM_Any for some of the existing work arounds.