One niche for Perl is it's omnipresence in most commercial Unices, even if as ancient as 5.0005. I recall many cases at work when we had to use what's on the b

One niche for Perl is it's omnipresence in most commercial Unices, even if as ancient as 5.0005. I recall many cases at work when we had to use what's on the box and we were restricted by some funny policies to not to install/use any third-party (incl. open source) stuff. You may think it's weird, still it's quite popular in telco companies, banks and other monstrous borgs. Such organizations often run some quite old hardware/OSes and will run it for years, as they think it's cheaper to pay maintenance fees than to introduce a massive change (well often it's true). One indication you're using such box is lack of bash in favour of ksh or some so-called 'posix shell' (which usually isn't standarized at all, btw). So, Perl saved our asses many times. The reason why some 'certified' stripped down Perl version was installed by the OS vendor was usually some ugly installer used by the vendor. A little quiz: which commercial Unix do I have in mind? ;-) [edit: typos]