Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is an interpreted language developed by Larry Wall and distributed over Usenet. Perl superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier. Unix sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of the languages of choice. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex, as the “Swiss-Army chain-saw” of Unix programming. It can be very concise (and thus hard to read) because of its powerful operators such as regular expression substitution.

Perl is a general purpose language, often used for scanning text and printing formatted reports. It provides extensive support for regular expression matching, dynamically scoped variables and functions, extensible run-time libraries, exception handling and packages, provide/require.

The use of Perl has grown significantly since its adoption as the language of choice of many World-Wide Web developers. CGI interfaces and libraries for Perl exist for several platforms and Perl's speed and flexibility make it well suited for form processing and on-the-fly page creation. Perl5 is a major rewrite and enhancement of Perl version 4. It adds nested data structures and object-oriented features.

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