Its true that perl can do (nearly?) everything bash can do, but a mix of both has been quite productive for me, ( if you are not worried about portability). The method suggested by brother hippsta is also one of my favorites. for example, if I want to create an R script for plotting data, or a gnuplot script, I prefer to create it in this way so that I have full control over all the variables. So if you have a script that has to be run with several different values and several times, and use other programs available on the command line, this is one of the easiest ways to go.

perliff