I suspect the rationale for Perl is that most Linux systems will probably have it installed already. Installing something you're familiar with is great when you can, but I'm guessing the awk script linked to here was picked more for its ubiquity than elegance.

Kinda, but not really. Of the infrastructures I've worked on, not a single one has been consistent in installing perl on 100% of hosts. The ones that get close are usually like that because one high up person really, really likes perl. And they send a lot of angry emails about perl not being installed.

Within infrastructures where perl is installed on 95% of hosts, that 5% really bites you in the ass and leads to infrastructure rot very quickly. You're kinda stuck writing and maintaining two separate scripts to do the same thing.

Same with Python. It's mostly available, but sometimes not.

With Perl, I find that a base installation is almost always available, but many packages might not be.

I dunno about that. IME, python is much, much more universally installed on the hosts I've worked on. Sure, usually it's 2.7, but it's there! I've tended to work on rhel and debian hosts, with some fedora in the mix.

(Once had a coworker reject a PR I wrote because I included a bash builtin in a deployment script. He said that python is more likely to be installed than bash, so we should not use bash. These debates are funny sometimes.)

Interesting, in my experience perl ends up pulled in as a dependency for one thing or another most of the time, but I don't have that perception about Python. Maybe there's just something I use that pulls in perl without me realizing and it's biased my experience.