PERL stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language". Perl is freely language, available under the Artistic License and the GPL. It was developed on Unix, and its Unix roots are pervasive. Perl is available for most operating systems but is particularly prevalent on Unix and Unix-like systems, and is growing in popularity on Windows. It's popularly used for system administration and network administration purposes because of its scripting nature and its ability to extract data fast. Also, because perl code can be run on both linux and windows.

Perl has been used for CGI programming as well. This means it has been used for developing web-applications on Apache server. It is made to run on apache server using a module called mod_perl.