Suppose you compare the same application written in C and in Perl. What's the first thing you're going to notice? The C program is about 10 times longer. The number of bugs in a program probably scales as the number of lines of code raised to some power between 1 and 2, so this is a big advantage of Perl. A lot of the string manipulations that a Perl programmer would do with a one-line regex, a C programmer would have to do with a page full of loops and pointers. All that code potentially harbors dangling pointer bugs, infinite loops, etc. Of course if you have access to really good libraries that you can call from C, then maybe you wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel so much. But experience does show this factor-of-10 difference in code size, so either the libraries don't exist, or people don't use them, or they're buggy, or they're nonportable, or they cost money, or ...

I think a lot of the previous replies to your question were unhelpful: "Infinite loops are bad. Improve your skills." Well, if those possessing true code fu can always write bug-free C code, then why is it that people are still finding buffer-overflow bugs in 20-year-old BSD Unix code? An infinite loop is only one of the classes of bugs that you referred to.

Also, when you code in C and call someone else's toolbox, you are vulnerable to their bugs. If their code chokes on the parameters you passed and dumps core, then you're going to have a long, hard day ahead of you with a machine-level debugger. This kind of thing is much less of a problem with Perl calling Perl, since, e.g., there's no such thing as a dangling pointer crash.

Perl will not cure all your problems, but it may reduce them. I also enjoy the process of coding in Perl a lot more than I enjoyed C coding, because I can focus on creativity and problem-solving.