I learned Perl about 4 years ago. For some reason I got it in my head that since I was finally getting used to "that Linux thing," I needed to learn a scripting language. My first really useful Perl scripts did fancy renaming of large amounts of files. In fact, I still use [heavily] modified versions of those scripts today. :)

I guess it's somewhat atypical that I never really got heavily into Perl for CGI, but I already knew and was happy using PHP for that... and even today I still avoid Perl CGI as much as possible. I just like to use it for general purpose programming.