With it's file handling, pattern matching and reporting facilities, Perl has proven to be a superb system administration/maintenance tool. Typical uses that are well suited to Perl include:
Perl is ideal for analysis and reporting of the multitude of log files and other text files that abound on any typical Unix system.
For example, here is a very simple script that reports the number of logins for each user, with the resulting example output:
User Count -------- ----- ftp 2 david 25 graeme 606 marg 16 nick 20 reboot 54 root 62 runlevel 27 shutdown 24 tracy 123 wtmp 1