CPAN is probably the biggest influence, it is the ancestor of most package managers used today. But Perl has also spread its dialect of regular expression and t

CPAN is probably the biggest influence, it is the ancestor of most package managers used today. But Perl has also spread its dialect of regular expression and the idea of regular expression literals, plus it was hugely influential on Ruby which then have lived on in Elixir and Crystal. Also you may be correct about it kicking off the scripting languages' popularity, and as someone else mentioned it is also responsible for cgibin.