Well, considering the original remit for perl (back in the pre-Perl 5, pre-OOP, pre-CPAN days) was to glue sed and awk together with a proper programming langua

Well, considering the original remit for perl (back in the pre-Perl 5, pre-OOP, pre-CPAN days) was to glue sed and awk together with a proper programming language and full access to the POSIX library, that shouldn't be a surprise. Aren't a2p and s2p still part of the standard Perl distribution? (Haven't looked: stopped driving Perl for a living more than ten years ago.) If there's one argument against using perl in place of these other tools it's simply the cognitive overhead of learning the extra stuff perl brings to the table on top of bash, sed and awk. On the other hand, picking up non-OO old-school perl if you're already a proficient shell scripter should be a day's work ... the important thing is knowing when to switch tools.