Perl is a high-level programming language that comes installed by default in Ubuntu. It is well known for it's use for text manipulation, CGI scripts and it's huge community. You can find any modul and many tutorials on http://www.cpan.org/
Perl is optimised for scanning arbitrary text files and system administration. It has built-in extended regular expression matching and replacement, a data-flow mechanism to improve security with setuid scripts and is extensible via modules that can interface to C libraries.