The best thing you can probably do is find something that you enjoy, then try to become an expert at it. Perl is alive and kicking, PHP and other web technologies are alive and kicking, pick something that you enjoy doing, so when and if you get a job doing that, you'll actually like what you're doing. Is there any point learning something that you hate, only to get into a job doing something you hate, but you must do it because you get paid for it?

I don't think learning Perl is ever a bad choice, and according to the job postings I've looked at recently, knowing Perl and one of the shells (like bash or ksh) are listed there quite a lot under the 'desired qualifications' section. You might not know one of the 'required' technologies, but if you're a Perl expert, that can make up for a lot of other missing skills.