Perl is strong (probably stronger), but Python is so much easier and programmer friendly. And if you are just beginning to programm in a new language, you won't miss all the complex features the other is providing (hell, you might never use them).
I'd go for Python (have gone a month ago, got probably a day or two of programming and have to say I love it. So well structured and very easy. I have created a script that indexes a given directory and all files in it's subdirectories. And a search engine to search where a given file is. It took only some 10 lines of code to acomplish
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