To me that question never really arose. I learned Perl before I knew the shell well enough to make use of awk or sed. By the time my shell scripts hit the compl

To me that question never really arose. I learned Perl before I knew the shell well enough to make use of awk or sed. By the time my shell scripts hit the complexity ceiling, I happily switched to Perl and haven't regretted it. The shell scripts I write are usually just canned commands, maybe some tweaking with environment variables. Anything more complex I usually handle using Perl. Shell scripts supposedly are more portable because the Bourne shell is always there, but that only is true with different Unix flavours. Once you run into a Windows box, (or more exotic systems like OS/400 (whatever IBM calls it these days), VMS, z/OS, BS2000), shell scripts won't help you. Perl will. ;-) Last but not least: CPAN. There are perl modules available for nearly anything you could ask for. (Except talking to SharePoint, which I sadly have to do on a fairly regular basis. OTOH, having known its horrors, I can understand why the Perl community wants to stay away from that POS.)