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.