Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information.  The  language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,  minimal). Perl 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.  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 hashes.  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. Different versions, extensions, utilities, examples, applications and documentation of Perl can be found in CPAN archives (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network).

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