Perl is slower, but has a ton of shortcuts (inspired by awk) to make common text processing tasks even easier. If you already know awk it may not be of much benefit. But CPAN makes it easy to scale up to a more robust program when needed.

I wrote a quick and dirty HCL parser in about an hour using functional programming in Perl, and I hadn't really touched Perl in years. It's still pretty nifty.

Perl one-liners can be incredibly powerful, but I keep using awk because it's a much smaller and simpler language to keep in my head. My trusty old Camel book, 2nd ed, is what, 500+ pages?

For more complicated stuff I usually resort to python or even a compiled language.