[mekazu]

I use Perl similarly to awk if I need to use regex rather than white space delimited fields.

I think if you know Perl really well and can remember the command line arguments - particularly -E, -n, -I and -p - then it’s a good swap in substitute for grep, sed, awk, cut, bash, etc when whatever 5 min task you’re working on gets a tiny bit more complex.

Similarly a decent version perl 5 seems to be installed everywhere by default.

I’m curious to know if anyone would say the same about python or any other programs? I’m not particularly strong in short python scripting.

[macintux]

I would say Perl’s native support for regular expressions makes it more useful on the CLI than Python, but Python is also very low on my preferred languages list.

I do, however, use it for JSON pretty printing in a pipeline: python -mjson.tool IIRC.