perl can be a powerful stream editor. Most of you are probably familiar with perl command line execution a la the -e flag. Combine it with -p and -i and you get a worthy sed alternative! The -p flag tells perl to iterate the command given by -e over every command line arg (in this case, a filename, hopefully). If there are no command line args, it'll read from STDIN. The -i flag writes the output of the -p iteration back to the argument (writing the file).
Examples:
tmp@tmp:~$ perl -e 'print "test"x10;'
-Print 'test' to STDOUT 10 times. For those of you who are behind on the times ;P
tmp@tmp:~$ perl -pe 's/^(\s+)?(telnet|shell|login|exec)/# $2/' /etc/inetd.conf
-Comment out any uncommented (running) instances of telnet, shell, login, exec in inetd.conf. Note: this will only print to STDOUT, it will not edit the file.
tmp@tmp:~$ perl -pi -e 's/bgcolor=#ffffff/bgcolor=#000000/i' *.html
-Change the background colour on any html page in the directory from black to white. The i after the substitution regex is needed to negate case sensitivity. WARNING: The previous command does WRITE to all of the files specified as command line args.
Most of you can probably infer the empowering implications of this little morsel of scripting prestidigitation.