I'm assume that you are planning some kind of web interface.

I think that for most web based projects PHP is usually much simpler and the libraries you need are built in compared with perl where you would have to download and install them.

PHP is built from the ground up for producing web pages. I find web based stuff usually takes a fraction of the time to do in PHP than perl.

If you later decide to make the page public their are litterally hundreds of ISP's where your code will run without any alteration. A perl based solution would be A LOT MORE work.

On the other hand if it's not web based then perl is a few million times better.