Perl is really just one of a number of excellent (or not quite so :) tools to accomplish a given task. For example, If you need a script that has to run perpetually and rotate logs once in a while, well, you still can write a perl script to do the actual log rotation and crontab to schedule your script's work. Of course, a programmer with limited exposure to Unix system functionalities (or lack thereof), yet ample Perl programming experience, could write a daemon to also run perpetually, yet do the same job, and probably do it good.

Now, to me the question of when to not use Perl is actually rather straightforward. Mostly, the answer would be 'yes' if I'm dealing with CGI, sysadmin, or any other tasks that could be accomplished by a cleverly crafted 'script' (Perl is a clever language :). However, if there's a task where you clearly see that no script would help, certainly Perl wouldn't be the answer. For example, lack of processing power of a given computer is certainly a 'computer problem'. While, you could optimize your Perl script to squeeze maximum performance, replacing your processor or adding a couple extra MB of RAM might help. Hack, it does sound like a double edged sword in certain cases, doesn't it? ;-)

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+-.*)$/;
$_=["ps -e -o pid | "," $2 | "," -v "," "];`@$_`?{print"+ $1"}:{print"
+- $1"}&&`rm $1`;
print$\;}
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