I've been told that shell scripting is the way forward and that Perl has its own shell scripting process

Who gave you that piece of wisdom? Did he have pointy hair and is your boss?

A shell has two main features: it can be used interactively and it can be used as a programming language. It is called a shell because its purpose was originally just to run external programs - nothing else. Any product that tries to perform two functions has to make compromises, so generally a shell will not compare well against a product which only does one of those tasks - like Perl.
If you need that duality of interaction and programming in the same language then use a shell, otherwise use the language you are most comfortable with.