> for small edits sed it's better, and awk for some tabular based files by using xml2tsv or lots of TSV related tools. That, and shell, sed and awk are standar

> for small edits sed it's better, and awk for some tabular based files by using xml2tsv or lots of TSV related tools. That, and shell, sed and awk are standard tools which are easy to learn, every unix user should learn basics of (even a java developer), and this won't change anytime soon. However, this can't be said of Perl - it is a powerful tool, but it became culturally obsolete and deprecated, and most unix users in the present and the future won't be bothered to learn it, when learning more modern languages like Python is a better investment.