[Scarbutt]

Yes but you can't learn perl as quickly as you can learn awk.

[jfk13]

Though you can learn just enough perl to do awk-like things fairly easily. And then grow from there as needed.

[throwawayboise]

IDK. On my OpenBSD system the awk man page is under 500 lines, and it pretty much covers the subject.

I've tried to get started in Perl a few times, and just found it weird. It doesn't click. Awk is kind of weird too but it's so simple it doesn't matter.

I'm sure I would eventually get Perl if I had to use it. But for me, awk and sed and shell scripting have covered my needs.