Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" usually refers to Perl 5, but it may also refer to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6

The Perl languages borrow features from other programming languages including C, shell script (sh), AWK, and sed; Wall also alludes to BASIC and Lisp in the introduction to Learning Perl (Schwartz & Christiansen) and so on. They provide text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix command line tools, facilitating manipulation of text files. Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to it is then unsurpassed regular expression and string parsing abilities.