Typical uses of Perl

Text processing

Perl's original main use was text processing. It is exceedingly powerful in this regard, and can be used to manipulate textual data, reports, email, news articles, log files, or just about any kind of text, with great ease.

System administration tasks

System administration is made easy with Perl. It's particularly useful for tying together lots of smaller scripts, working with file systems, networking, and so on.

CGI and web programming

Since HTML is just text with built-in formatting, Perl can be used to process and generate HTML. Perl is probably the most popular language around for web development, and there are many tools and scripts available for free.

Database interaction

Perl's DBI module makes interacting with all kinds of databases --- from Oracle down to comma-separated variable files --- easy and portable. Perl is increasingly being used to write large database applications, especially those which provide a database backend to a website.

Other Internet programming

Perl modules are available for just about every kind of Internet programming, from Mail and News clients, interfaces to IRC and ICQ, right down to lower level Socket programming.

Less typical uses of Perl

Perl is used in some unusual places as well. The Human Genome Project relies on Perl for DNA sequencing, NASA use Perl for satellite control, PDL (Perl Data Language, pron. "piddle") makes number-crunching easy, and there is even a Perl Object Environment (POE) which is used for event-driven state machines.