I don't know if its backwards compatibility reaches into the 90s but I've been using ruby for this for like a decade now. Most envs that ship with anything ship with ruby and I've only very rarely run into version problems.

I think people tend to associate it only with a certain era of web dev, but it has remained a good scripting language with a large, consistent, well-documented standard library for a long time now.

Not worth switching off perl since you're very used to that, but iirc ruby was initially conceived as a successor to perl and for me at least it has landed in that role.