All depends on what you want to do, and how complex said task is likely to become in future.
I prefer to script larger projects in perl, rather than shell.
I use Perl where I can, but some things are just as easy, if not easier, with a couple of UNIX commands strung together in a shell script, or on the commandline.

There's more than one way to do it, and that one way might just be shell.

It's probably good to have enough of a clue how to script basic things. Sometimes, you might even end up mixing perl with shell, nasty though that may be, :-)

BazB