Now, my personal views: Perl is the Visual Basic of the open source world. It's possible to write good Perl code, but the structure and facilities of the language encourage bad habits and unreadable code. If you want to learn an open source scripting language, learn Ruby or Python. I prefer Ruby, but either one will encourage better programming discipline than Perl. The information about Perl I gave above pretty much applies to Ruby and Python as well. Any of them are just an apt-get away.
What about Rexx ?