Before Perl, there was no scripting language that could do systems tasks except maybe shell and tcl, but that's shell is an extremely unpleasant programming experience and the performance is horrid, and tcl's string-based nature is just too weird.
Perl gives you something more like a real programming language and can do shell-like tasks and systems tasks very nicely. Compared to what came before, it is amazing.
But then Ruby and Python came along and checked the "real programming language" box even more firmly than Perl while retaining the shell/systems angle. Ruby and Python were better than Perl along exactly the same axis as the one on which Perl was better than Tcl and shell.
It is a real general-purpose programming language, not a "scripting" language. Did you ever have a look at it?
TBH, prior to perl6, perl was such a horrid inconsistent mess, it reeked of shell.