Guys,
Can you tell me what value would additional knowledge of PERL and CGI scripting will add to my skill set of UNIX shell scripting and ORACLE PL/SQL?
I understand that PERL is a good tool for text processing.
If you already have a familiarity with shell scripting you should pick up Perl very quickly as it is based on sh, awk, sed and a little bit of C.
Perl is excellent at text processing, it has its own database independent module for SQL processing and there is an Oracle definition for this so you can use it to extract informnation from your DB and report on it in HTML format (the CGI.pm module offers a very easy way to produce structured HTML).
However, for me, the real strength of Perl is for quick production of scripts to extract information from a DB or plain text (or just about anything as it can handle an enormous range of formats using the modules on CPAN.
I'd strongly reccomend learning Perl as it should be fairly intuitive for you with your skill-set.