I'm a firm believer that there are many ways to work effectively. If Perl fills the same needs for you that sed does for some people, then by all means stick to

I'm a firm believer that there are many ways to work effectively. If Perl fills the same needs for you that sed does for some people, then by all means stick to Perl. However, for someone who knows neither, here are some reasons you might want to choose sed over Perl: 1. sed syntax is pervasive in other tools. For example, to run a substitution from early on in the tutorial in vim, type :%s/abc/(&)/<enter> from insert mode. 2. sed is simpler than Perl. It used to be that Perl filled a unique role as a scripting language but now there are a bunch of languages in that space (most notably Python and Ruby). Python + sed for example would fulfill most of the same functions that Perl does (and there are reasons to choose Python over Perl as scripting languages, although that's a much more complicated domain to discuss). 3. sed is more performant (or so I hear). This has never been a real concern for me, but some people cite this is a concern. 4. sed usually is a bit more terse. For the length of expressions you'll typically be writing with sed, this isn't a big concern. Disclaimer: There are probably good reasons to choose Perl over sed, too. Not being a Perl guy, I don't know those reasons. I'll leave that to someone who knows more about Perl. When I learned sed it was because I was taking a *nix class in college, and a professor pointed me at sed and not Perl. I learned sed instead of Perl because it was put in front of me, not because of any weighing of pros and cons. That's how a lot of learning happens. Sometimes simply learning what's put in front of you leads turns out to be an obvious mistake in retrospect (I was stuck writing VBA for a little while). I don't know whether learning Perl or sed is better for what sed does, but I do know that after maybe 6ish years using sed quite frequently it hasn't turned out to be an obvious mistake.