26 years ago today, on December 18, 1987, Larry Wall released Perl to an unsuspecting world. The earliest reference to the posting to Usenet's comp.sources.unix is Perl, a "replacement" for awk and sed. Perl did make awk and sed semi-obsolete. (This is Unix, where you can never get rid of anything.) In the process of doing so, it gave system administrators more power than they had by combining she