Rather than us trying to figure out what you can do with perl, why don't you describe an everyday task or two that you're unhappy with. Maybe they take a long time to run or you have to kick off two or more shell scripts to get one piece of output or there's too much manual intervention.

That's pretty much how I started in perl - converting shell scripts that took hours to run. For instance, how do you do your log reports now? Are they too big file size wise or do you think it's too big of a task for you to handle right now? Maybe you could start be doing a more simplistic log report. That would give you a feel for perl and if you did it right, it could be easily expanded (but don't worry about that too much 'cuz it's always hard to do right off the bat).

-derby