Why is Perl installed by default on Linux?

Question

Perl

Just curious.
Why is Perl installed by default on most Linux distributions?

Answer 1

In debian stable and everything based on it perl goes because there is apt which depends on dpkg-dev which depends on perl...

Answer 2

so look at the system everything is written there,
for example, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS server, trimmed to the maximum. we climb into aptitude (a convenient functional add-on over apt).
see how many packages depend on perl
--\ Packages that depend on perl (4562)
in 4.5 thousand packages there are a lot of different necessary programs, up to qt5 libraries.
the package also provides the system with the virtual name perl:any, which is also what many want.
--\ Packages that depend on perl:any (419)
there is also a perl-base package (the minimum set of perls) on which everything depends
--\ Packages that depend on perl-base (20)
but which
i A debconf 1.5 .66
i A init-system-helpers 1.51

Answer 3

Huge amount of legacy code.
It's silly to write something new on Perl, but it's just as silly to rewrite something that already works fine and is not in the phase of active development.

Answer 4

It is said that in Linux and in most Unix OSes, several Perl scripts are used to build the kernel without which the kernel cannot be built.
It is also said that someone tried to write these Bash scripts to exclude Perl from FreeBSD, but I am not aware of the results.

Answer 5

Many scripts and utilities are written in Perl:
pgbadger
innotop
mytop
inxi
spamassassin