As someone who lived through that transition, we used Perl extensively to sysadmin ~30 Solaris and Irix workstations and it was superlative at that.

At that time, Guido was still working at CNRI locally to us in Reston, VA and we had several discussions at the local Pyggies (Python User Group) on transitioning over to Python for that work. We were a (mostly) C++/Java shop, but Perl fit into all the other "crevices" beautifully.

Python just didn't have enough library support for all of our "swiss-army chainsaw" demands. Still, it was very apparent at the time it would eventually get there and I was enamored with its "one right way" of doing things--even at the bytecode level.