Acronym formed from Practical Extraction and Report Language. Perl is an interpreted programming language developed by Larry Wall, used to manipulate text, files, and processes and to print reports on the extracted information.
Perl is rapidly becoming the system administrator's answer to all those problems that a C program does not seem to fit. It does not have the arbitrary limitations of other languages, so lines can be of any length, arrays can be of any size, variable names can be as long as you care to make them, and binary data does not cause problems.