http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=638065

sg has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Under what conditions and/or for what goals (if any!) would a shell script (csh, bash, dos-batch etc.) be more appropriate than a perl script?

Update (Sep 29, 07): People have been wondering if this is a homework question: it isn't. Recently, my hard-drive crashed and I am working on a periodic data archival scheme using rsync and cdrtools. I have been successfully rsync'ing by hand. Since the planned automated script would be calling rsync and cdrtools -- which in turn would be interacting with the OS to work with the file-system -- I was wondering if it would be safer to stay close to the OS and use batch files rather than perl. Such is the motivation for this question.