Agreed, I find the GP comment kind of bizarre. Like, the thing Perl is truly great at is processing text files. Hell, it's one of the main reasons I use it (that and as a general replacement for shell scripting when I need to do anything moderately complex).

And if you really wanna deal with files and directories, IO::File and IO::Dir are easier interfaces to work with and there's plenty of other helper modules out there. I'd never use the base primitives as described in that article.

Mix in File::Find or equivalent and Perl is incredible for file handling.