> If you choose to do complex things and do them in complex ways, or you can only see complex solutions where simple solutions exist, I guess a module-powered scripting language like Perl becomes irresistable and using the UNIX base utilities becomes a prohibitively painful exercise.

Here again, your ignorance is showing, and you are projecting your own limitation onto others. You suggest that someone who uses Perl feels the need to use it everywhere, that it's more complex than shell tools, and that Perl somehow becomes a crack-like addiction, forcing you to never use command line tools again.

That's just plain silly. There are tons of people who make heavy use Unix tools and Perl. This isn't an either-or situation like you seem to be pushing. They're all just tools for solving problems. The smart thing is to recognize when each tool is appropriate, and then use them properly.

For example, the other day I was working with a log file. Initially, I was beating on it with command line tools: find, grep, cut, sed, sort, uniq, wc, etc. Eventually, I got what I needed out of it, but knew I was going to need something more to present to my team, so I pulled out awk, and I wrote a little script to extract the data and generate a simple report. A few days later, management saw the report, and liked it. But, they wanted some additional features added, and some changes to the processing. I could have hacked what they wanted into the awk script, but the processing had gotten complex enough that I knew I was better off making the jump to Perl. So, I rewrote it in Perl, and got everything they wanted. Additionally, it had the flexibility with Perl that the next two feature requests that management made were implemented in just a few minutes each.

Also, in case you weren't aware of it, Perl integrates and happily makes use of external commands. If there's a tool out there that will do some heavy lifting for you, Perl makes it trivial to call out to that command (just like backticks or $(/bin/foo) in bash).

If you really want to do complex scripting with Unix tools, then you're either limiting yourself to pretty trivial work, or you're making things a lot harder on yourself than they need to be. Perl was created for a reason, and it's a good one. Small scripts or glue to tie things together, use a shell script and Unix tools. Complex scripts, use a real scripting language, make things easier on yourself, and get more work done in a faster, better way.

You wrote a website with only the shell and unix utilities?

I write small, simple shell functions using a single busybox-like binary that do the same things as Perl modules. I store the shell functions in a local repository and load/unload them as needed. I make "programs" by combining different functions.