a “replacement” for awk and sed · Perl/perl5@8d063cd · GitHub

[  Perl is kind of designed to make awk and sed semi-obsolete.  This posting
   will include the first 10 patches after the main source.  The following
   description is lifted from Larry's manpage. --r$  ]

   Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text
   files, extracting information from those text files, and printing
   reports based on that information.  It's also a good language for many
   system management tasks.  The language is intended to be practical
   (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny,
   elegant, minimal).  It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some
   of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with
   those languages should have little difficulty with it.  (Language
   historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even
   BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C
   expression syntax.  If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed
   or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little
   faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may
   be for you.  There are also translators to turn your sed and awk
   scripts into perl scripts.