I can solve almost any problem with a well-written shell script. Why should I try another scripting language?
Shell scripts are a great starting point, and you can accomplish a lot with them. Some people associate shell scripts with the batch files of MS-DOS and early Windows, but today's shell scripts are much more powerful. Still, shell scripting has three limitations that drove me to learn Perl and other languages.
Shell scripting has limitations handling math operations beyond the simple features available with the Set /A command. Another shell-script problem is the scripting language's limited ability to detect and manipulate text strings. Remember that Perl is the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language and that it excels at manipulating text strings. Finally, shell scripts don't perform as well as Perl scripts. I've written some shell scripts that run for several hours at high CPU utilization to build report sets. The same scripts rewritten in Perl run much more quickly and with less CPU overhead.
