>noticing a lack of literature on Perl on the command line
I have written a book on Perl one-liners with plenty of examples and exercises [0]. I've also written books on CLI text processing tools like grep, sed, awk and coreutils [1]. If you prefer just solving exercises, check out my interactive TUI apps [2].
>Is awk just better for this use case?
It depends on the kind of tasks you'd need to solve. I generally prefer grep, sed and awk first. Perl helps if I need powerful regexp and other niceties like the huge number of built-in functions and access to third-party libraries.
[0] https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_perl_oneliners/
[1] https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks