`perl -pe` vs `sed`, performance-wise
macos, perl, sed
Solution
Perl is probably a bit slower than `sed` (but not by much — it is a very fast scripting language); however, if Perl does what you need and `sed` doesn't, use Perl.
Note that Perl is (still) distributed with the programs `s2p` and `a2p` which convert `sed` and `awk` scripts respectively into Perl. So you can devise your script in `sed` and then automatically translate to Perl (and adapt to exploit enhanced Perl regular expressions, etc).
Problem
On OSX, the system `sed` seems, at times, a bit limited regarding regular expressions and some escape characters — so much, that I end up using `perl -pe` a fair bit of the time, and now I’m wondering if I should care about using `sed` at all. I usually need this when piping a lot of commands in a row, usually calling `sed` and `perl` multiple times during its execution, and I’d like to know if I should use `sed` when it does the job, using `perl` only when it is necessary. I’m interested in this from a performance point of view (having multiple commands of this kind in a script can make a difference in the end), but if there are any other considerations you deem worthy of mentioning, they’re welcome, naturally.