As others have already said, Perl is a tool. You would not use a hammer to cut wood, instead you would use it to drive or remove nails. Perl, like every other tool, has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Do you want to know the major advantages of Perl for writing shell script replacements, CGI applications, etc?

Do you want to know the major advantages of Perl when compared to PHP, Python, Java, etc?

What is the context?