One of Perl's strengths, actually, was (is?) how well it was supported on many different types of systems. Today's world is largely Linux/Windows/Mac, but that was far less true in the 90s.
I started using Perl on VMS, where there was no sed, (g)awk was new, no grep ("search" did not handle regular expressions, "find" did but arrived very late); and the command language, while sane, was very slow. Perl's system integration on VMS was excellent.
When I started working at AOL in 2002, I was given a list of commands and jobs to run manually on a Stratus VOS mainframe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratus_VOS It was tedious and lame (not necessarily Stratus' fault). But then I discovered that someone had ported Perl to VOS! And I was able to script my daily routine away.
I started using Perl on VMS, where there was no sed, (g)awk was new, no grep ("search" did not handle regular expressions, "find" did but arrived very late); and the command language, while sane, was very slow. Perl's system integration on VMS was excellent.