I would guess that that's all a significant number of unix-like OS users do with sed, and in those circumstances, it does make more sense to use sed than a more

I would guess that that's all a significant number of unix-like OS users do with sed, and in those circumstances, it does make more sense to use sed than a more extensive language. For simple substitutions like that, I'd just use an alias: alias ped='perl -lpe' to save the extra keystrokes.