If I'd written it after indent (the first bit of Perl in libretools), I probably would have written it in Perl. But, I wrote distcc-tool while I was still first learning Perl, and 4 months before indent; 4 months before I evaluated Perl as being safe to use inside a chroot.

Rewriting it in Perl would also allow it to ask the kernel for random unused ports, instead of counting up from 8000. Not that we expect there to be a collision; since it's in the chroot's private network namespace, there shouldn't be anything on any ports.

Wait, the list of ports has to be deterministic across multiple runs of distcc-tool rewrite.