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Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language.
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 in C,
then Perl may be for you.
Perl combines features of C, sed, awk, and sh,
so people familiar with those languages should
have little difficulty with it.
Perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data.
Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching
techniques to scan large amounts of data quickly.
Although optimized for scanning text,
Perl can also deal with binary data.
perldoc offers a general intro for beginners