Perl is excellent for automation. The biggest automation task I took on was a bespoke build and test system that ran on multiple version of Windows and Mac OS. In its first form it rebuilt all our applications, add ons and tools overnight then ran regression and until tests against everything using a distributed database of task queues and a "Releases" file server that used a small configuration file to describe each build or test task. Later I added support for continuous integration with almost no change to the overall system.

On the very small scale I use Perl to take the contents of an email newsletter and reformat it for use on a web page with page links for the sections in the newsletter, email addresses appropriately wrapped, tabulated data in tables, ... .

Perl has great cross platform support and a lot of system support built in. CPAN is a vast resource with a lot of excellent and widely used (and yes, some rubbish) modules covering almost anything you need to support automating stuff.