Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text
files, extracting information from those text files, and printing
reports based on that information.  It's also a good language for many
system management tasks.  The language is intended to be practical
(easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny,
elegant, minimal).  It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some
of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with
those languages should have little difficulty with it.  (Language
historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even
BASIC-PLUS.)  Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C
expression syntax.

Unlike most Unix utilities, perl does not arbitrarily limit the size
of your data.  If you've got the memory, perl can slurp in your whole
file as a single string.  Recursion is of unlimited depth.  And the
hash tables used by associative arrays grow as necessary to prevent
degraded performance.  Perl uses sophisticated pattern matching
techniques to scan large amounts of data very quickly.  Although
optimized for scanning text, perl can also deal with binary data, and
can make dbm files look like associative arrays (where dbm is
available).  Setuid perl scripts are safer than C programs through a
dataflow tracing mechanism which prevents many stupid security holes.
If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but
it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you
don't want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you.
There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into perl
scripts.

 PERMSSN    UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO     CRC       STAMP          NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
-rw-rw-r-- 20025/200   3344179 9728000  34.4% -lh5- 80e6 Mar 30  1998 perl-5.004_03-bin.tar
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
 Total         1 file  3344179 9728000  34.4%            Mar 16  1998