Yep Perl* is a great swiss army knife that rendered sed and awk obsolete -- I am old enough (50) to have been thru this progression. It's funny to see awk and sed come back around.

(It's a little like functional programming being rediscovered when Lisp has been around since the dawn of time).

* I think Perl got carried away when it added objects and folks started writing large programs with it (although I have written some large scripts for biologists doing genetic studies -- which is interesting popular use case == there are google groups and O'Reilly books focused on this use case).

Also, Larry Wall really humped the shark with Perl 6.