About 5-6 years ago I found a new niche for Perl in my day-to-day work. I did a lot of shell scripting at the time and was constantly getting annoyed by subtle differences between macOS and Linux. Sed is especially difficult, because the flags in BSD version and GNU version for in-place search and replace do not match. Plus, sed regexes are more primitive compared to most other languages.
I decided to switch from sed to Perl for all my string replacements and at the time it made my life so much easier! Eventually I started expanding my Perl use to a few lines of code at the time, and now I write a few larger (100+ LOC) scripts in it a year.
Funny how my personal journey matches the story of Perl back in the 80s: it was born to replace more primitive tools.
I decided to switch from sed to Perl for all my string replacements and at the time it made my life so much easier! Eventually I started expanding my Perl use to a few lines of code at the time, and now I write a few larger (100+ LOC) scripts in it a year.
Funny how my personal journey matches the story of Perl back in the 80s: it was born to replace more primitive tools.