The case for Perl is just that it has no limits. You will never run out of tool if you go with Perl. That is what, I believe, makes the investment worthwhile.

Why Perl gets such a bad rap, then? I'll tell you.

I've used Perl for almost 30 years now, and I've never found any limits in the tool. This means every limit I found was _mine_. Many programmers feel bad when they find their own limits, but it doesn't have to be the case.

You should be OK with finding your own limits, and be willing to overcome them, and strive to become a Perl power user, just like the founder, Larry Wall.

If you choose this, to grow and improve and be better, and better, and better, then Perl is the best option.

It's up to you.

AWK is better suited to command line ad-hoc and shell script use. it is simple, straight-forward, and surprisingly powerful. most of the time sh+awk can replace sh+sed+cut+grep constructs. GNU awk (gawk) flavor is ubiquitous and it has a great manual [1]. and you have the AWK book [2] (not "free", but easily found).

perl is more of a completely replacement for sh+awk for a standalone script/program. it was the first scripting language i know of that could do sockets networking and other complex things you'd previously need to write in c. it has extremely powerful text processing capabilities, like awk. but it's a big complicated, unusual scripting language. if you want a big complex full-featured scripting language to make a complete tool these days, why not use Python? if you only need really fancy text manipulation, maybe Perl, but i don't see that use a lot.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/index.htm... [2] https://awk.dev/

>noticing a lack of literature on Perl on the command line

I have written a book on Perl one-liners with plenty of examples and exercises [0]. I've also written books on CLI text processing tools like grep, sed, awk and coreutils [1]. If you prefer just solving exercises, check out my interactive TUI apps [2].

>Is awk just better for this use case?

It depends on the kind of tasks you'd need to solve. I generally prefer grep, sed and awk first. Perl helps if I need powerful regexp and other niceties like the huge number of built-in functions and access to third-party libraries.

[0] https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_perl_oneliners/

[1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks

[2] https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps

>> I’m also noticing a lack of literature on Perl on the command line, I.e “perl -nae <some script>”.

Searching for 'perl one liners' and the related term 'perl golf' gives many articles and books:

https://www.perl.com/article/perl-one-liners-part-1/

https://www.perl.com/article/perl-one-liners-part-2/

https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-one

https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-two

https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-three

https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-four

https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-five

https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-six

https://catonmat.net/perl-one-liners-explained-part-seven

http://novosial.org/perl/one-liner/

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/perl-one-liners/9781457...

I highly recommend awk because you can learn it in 20 minutes [1]

So you can start by spending 20 minutes to learn awk, and then spend 20 years to learn Perl (and use awk in the mean time)

[1]: https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html

Having learned both at an intermediate level, I use awk for structured data handling, Perl for textual pattern matching.

Perl was inspired by awk, not the other way around. Perl is more general purpose.

Perl is far more capable than awk and more portable.

The issue with awk is that there are multiple non-interoperable implementations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK#Versions_and_implementatio...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40409632/what-is-the-dif...

This makes awk scripts less portable than other text processing tools.

awk is also not extensible--it can be awkward (heh) to adapt it to some problems and big scripts get difficult to wrangle.

awk is great if your text processing problem is small.

Sometimes small problems grow in which case Perl tends to be a better choice:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/366980/what-are-the-diff...

People love to hate perl, but there is a reason why it was installed on all Unix and Linux systems by default and was so popular for web servers on the early Internet (e.g. Apache mod_perl https://perl.apache.org/ and perl mason https://www.perl.com/pub/2002/12/11/mason.html/ ).

Perl also popularized regular expressions as a standard component of programming languages so much that "Perl-compatible regular expressions" are probably the most widely-used regex flavor versus POSIX or other regex variants:

http://www.pcre.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

If you're looking at learning Perl then you'll find the https://perldoc.perl.org/ site very useful (you'll probably also have its content available on the command line via the perldoc command).

If you want more information about running Perl on the command line then start with https://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun (or `perldoc perlrun` in your shell)

Maybe not so much a question of 'better' but perl is definitely bigger and multiheaded and does many, many more things (perl scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should). So you'll spend a lot more time (compared to awk) orienting yourself, beside the learning of the thing you want to know about. That could be a fun extra hobby or a waste of time, depending on your goals and inclinations.

Awk for sure! The pdf for the original awk book is somewhere around the web, i learned awk from that and it’s mostly still good. I heard they made a new edition some time ago? Really worth reading!

For perl… not sure. I learned a bit of perl in high school and never had a chance to use it, even at work where i occasionally see it being used from other people.

How much time do you want to invest ?

Perl is more powerful but learning and remembering all (or a sufficiently more powerful superset of awk's capabilities) of it is going to take time. The peculiarities of its syntax is certainly not a small set.

All of awk on the other hand needs about 2 hours, if you have done some programming before.

Perl for sure, because it's much better than awk. Also perl has a huge set of libraries, awk has nothing.

The tools have a lot of overlap. No need to choose one over the other, you can learn both. I don't write Perl but knowing how to read it comes in handy. AWK usually does what I need.

i feel like awk is better for simple pipings and the likes, so i guess it depends on what you need to do. I find myself using awk a lot expecially with other programs

use Python, so that other people can read it

i wouldnt go for perl...id suggest the better question to be awk vs python, in which case id go for python