Perl is a high-level programming language with roots in C, sed, awk and shell scripting. Perl is good at handling processes and files, and is especially good at handling text. Perl;s hallmarks are practicality and efficiency. While it is used to do a lot of different things, Perl;s most common applications are system administration utilities and web programming. This is a metapackage with all the Perl bits and core modules that can be found in the upstream tarball from perl.org. If you need only a specific feature, you can install a specific package instead. E.g. to handle Perl scripts with /usr/bin/perl interpreter, install perl-interpreter package. See perl-interpreter description for more details on the Perl decomposition into packages.