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AWK is the general-purpose programmatic filter and reporting tool in the Unix pipeline. Sed, grep and cut are specializations for specific use cases whose implementations might have better performance. Perl and Python are probably too general-purpose for writing compact one-liners in a pipeline.

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Even though it's more characters, I usually use perl -pe 's/search/replace/' instead of sed in pipelines because it understands /n (and other escape characters I don't remember). Because all it takes is to get burned a couple times for it to be worth sticking with what you know will work.

The Perl version is considerably faster on large files as well. Or at least, it is when compared to the version of BSD sed shipped with OSX.

This is probably not the case with the sed in Linux.

"/n"? What's that? My `man perlre' doesn't say anything about this regexp flag.

because OP is referring to escape characters I assume it is a typo for "\n"

Probably not what rflrob meant, but /n prevents parentheses from capturing.

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#%2an%2a

This is somewhat surprising. A relatively new feature, and not present in my current Perl.

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