Practical extraction and reporting language, or Perl, is a scripting language first created by Larry Wall to be used as duct tape for programming with the Unix operating system. Due to its immense power for handling piles of text and, consequently, as a common gateway interface (CGI) scripting language, Perl became very popular among server-side scripters. Perl has a large community of contributing programmers and, what's more, costs nothing and is free to redistribute. These circumstances have helped Perl evolve from a scripting language used to generate server stats into a language many use for database administration.

Perl modules and add-ons are available to do most anything leading some to call it the "Swiss Army chainsaw" of programming languages.