Never having come across a scripting task that couldn't be solved quickly and easily with sh/sed/awk/grep etc. the need to learn Perl has never presented itself to me. 

Those who have learned Perl assure me that NpComplete problems can be resolved in five minutes by a TrivialPerlScript.

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 perl -MLWP::Simple -e "getprint 'http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TrivialPerlScript'"
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If by resolved you mean that someone's already written something to do it, well, that's quite possible.  See CPAN [http://www.cpan.org/].  CPAN is the primary reason why I use Perl.

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I learnt just enough Perl to call awk/grep/etc...  somewhat handy for CGI

''Most "scripting" tasks can indeed be done with sh/sed/awk/grep. They can also be done with Perl. I learned Perl partly to save myself learning umpteen other tools. (Of course I can use sh and grep. I've never needed sed or awk. And you know what they say about sed: Every now and then, a programmer will have a problem and suddenly think "I know, I can use sed!" Then he has two problems.) But then, my language of choice for this sort of task is Python rather than Perl these days, so what do I know? --GarethMcCaughan''

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CategoryPerl