There's nothing shell scripts can do that cannot be done in Perl1. But there are things that are easier done in a shell script than in Perl. Sourcing other shell scripts for instance (and hence, getting access to environment variables). You can't really beat 
  . /path/to/config/file

[download]
in Perl for ease, neither keystrokes.

1Of course, there's nothing a Perl program can do that cannot be done in Python, Java or C. That doesn't imply some people rather write Perl...

In reply to Re^2: building and running a unix script with Perl by JavaFan
in thread building and running a unix script with Perl by Spooky

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