It could be familiarity, but for small- to medium-scale "scripts", I still find Perl to be the best alternative to bash+sed+awk+grep thrown in, when I want to go to something more conventionally programming-ish. Basically its original use-case, before Modern Perl.

You can use Python for that, but the jump from Unix shell to Python feels bigger; everything is more verbose and less awk-y in Python. Which can be good for maintainability of bigger scripts, but feels heavyweight for some stuff.