With respect, the shell can do quite a lot. Korn shell and Bash are more than just program launchers, Bash 3, for example, supports Extended REs. Whole applications are written in Korn, however mis-guided that might be.
I agree that converting a shell script that just called external programs to a perl script that called the same external programs would be a waste of time, but I hope to replace utility programs with Perl equivalents.

In reply to Re^2: RFC: UNIX shell to Perl converter by cdarke
in thread RFC: UNIX shell to Perl converter by cdarke

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