Perl aside, I would say that's almost imperative to learn sed and awk. They invaluable tools for getting things done in *nix. They seem cryptic at first, but put a weekend into learning them and you learn that they are simply concise.
And then you have a script that needs to run on a mac as well and you can either fight that the people will install the gnu version or you just rewrite your one-liner in perl.
I'm not a huge fan of perl but I've been writing my one-liners in it for a few years now and I've had less problems with portability.
I would use another language for distributing a script (probably) python. Awk and sed I use more on a one-off basis although I do have a list of ones I use frequently.
