It's usually a trade off. Years ago, anything that would take more than 10 lines in shell, I'd write in Perl. Nowadays, the cut-off mark is at 1 line. If I can't do it in one line of a shell command, I do it in Perl. But there are a lot of things that could be done in one line of shell I do in Perl.

There are exceptions of course. A Bourne shell (or a superset like the Korn shell or a POSIX shell) is found on any Unix system - unlike Perl. And installing Perl isn't always an option. So, sometimes I write long complicated shell scripts. But I would prefer Perl....

Abigail