That was the reason Perl was what I switched too from bash when I was working on Solaris boxes; it was miles ahead of what was possible with bash AND it was already present. If I remember an older version of Python was also installed but by then Perl had already got me reeled in and I felt Python to be too "verbose" compared to Perl (I eventually changed my opinion when I got a bit more experience under my belt).
Ha - I actually haven't changed my opinion about verbosity, Python is still more verbose and I will choose Perl for throwaway scripts even today; I just have a greater appreciation of readability of Python code compared to the free-for-all style-fest of Perl code (admittedly written by a bunch of devs with little code style enforcement). Perl is great for smaller scripts but I'm talking about many thousands lines of code and the lack of native object orientation, messy error handling, lack of a decent repl etc start to take their toll.
