Shell Programming and Scripting

What is the advantages of Perl in Unix environnement.
Is it for scripts ? Text manipulation ?
Have you a Concrete exemple of perl utilisation.
Thanks you

The main advantage is the CPAN, http://www.cpan.org/

There are tasks that are very hard or impossible even with a powerful shell like ksh. Example: unix keeps time internally in seconds since the epoch. What date and time would 1164876000 correspond to? That would be a complex shell script if you had only a Posix shell and Posix utilities to work with. Perl solution:

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(shift),"\n"' 1164876000

Perl can manipulate text quite adroitly but so can Posix shells. I switch to perl when my requirements exceed the power of a shell. Often I use perl to write one-liners as above to assist the shell. While I doubt that you could write a device driver in perl, perl approaches c in power.

make a substitution in a list of files
and
make a backup copy of each:

Code:

perl -i.bak -pe 's/THIS/THAT/g' *