Normally I would do it with grep/sed/awk in a shell script.

Sure you could. Buy why? You can do that in Perl without spawning off a process for each grep/sed/awk operation I am performing. Comparision:

netstat -s | grep 'Trans' | awk '{... ehh... whatever...
[download]

just used three processes...

open PIPE... whatever...
my @line = grep 'Trans',<PIPE>; 
close PIPOE
[download]

used two. I know that is a weak example, but I hope it clarifies my position.

Plan your work... work your plan...