Prior to Perl most text processing was done with unix pipelines and awk/sed/C. So Perl allowed people to stop writing C and also stop using lots of separate programs to do one thing. Many of the awk constructs survive in Perl such as running code once per line, // for regular expressions which implicitly work on the current line, $1/$2/$3 etc. so it's not too difficult to use Perl instead of awk.