.pl File — Perl Script

Perl is a high-level, interpreted programming language created by Larry Wall in 1987, known for its powerful text processing capabilities and the motto "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (TMTOWTDI). PL files contain Perl scripts that excel at text manipulation, regular expressions, system administration, web development (CGI era), and bioinformatics. Perl's regular expression engine is among the most powerful available, and its text processing features influenced many subsequent languages. Perl was the dominant language for CGI web programming in the 1990s and early 2000s, and remains essential in system administration (especially on Unix/Linux), bioinformatics (BioPerl), and text processing workflows. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) provides over 200,000 modules. Perl 5 features references, closures, object orientation, regular expression engine with lookahead/lookbehind, and the DBI database interface. While Perl's usage has declined relative to Python and Ruby for new projects, it remains deeply embedded in critical infrastructure, sysadmin tooling, and text-heavy workflows. Perl's successor Raku (formerly Perl 6) is a separate language with different design goals.