I would have to disagree with most of the sentiment here. I use both perl and shell for my scripting. PERL can be very powerful if you know how to use it. I've worked for a major multimedia news company and I can tell you that A LOT of their behind the scenes stuff is written in PERL. I hardly think it is a dying language.
I think that both are good/handy to learn and it's valuable to know both. When you know both, you'll know which is better in what particular situation.
Perl Rules!