Perl is a glue language as well. You can do what you need with sed + awk and a decent shell in unix, in my experience. There are exceptions. Driving interactive programs with stdio buffering involved means coprocesses and pipes fail. For that, as a previous commenter noted, you need expect like functionality. Both Perl and Tcl offer that (though tcl is the originating superset).
I don't use perl and feel most people should avoid it because of the tendency to use it where more common tools will do the job. But that's entirely personal and probably not a popular opinion.