how would this be done with awk, egrep or sed.

My guess is, the same as with Perl, as Perl luckily has this great compatibility to awk:

perl -ne 'print if m!^10/.*/2003! ... m!^11/.*/2003!' snmp.log
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I guess you pick up a UNIX oriented book about Perl which caters for your shell background, and learn how Perl can help you in your day-to-day tasks.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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