It has been speculated that nearly every corporation has a few linux boxes running some important internal task that is written in Perl.
I'd speculate that nearly all non-newbie sysadmins have some task automated with a bit of perl in the mix.
At one time it was claimed that perl was the glue that held the internet together - I think that's still largely true today
Without perl in your toolbox, I think it's analogous to not having a pair of slip jaw pliers; yeah, you CAN get by with out them, but they're really handy to have.
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).