In the automotive industry (where the majority of my clients come from
at work), Perl is being used quite a lot for automating all kinds of tasks,
such as glueing together other domain-specific applications (Catia, Nastran,
ANSA,...) to allow a coherent data- and workflow. Data format conversions,
automatic document generation (of test/simulation results, etc.), and
scriptable interfaces to various databases are other typical usages.
With any application that's primarily meant to be used interactively,
people sooner or later get tired of babysitting their computers with repetitive
tasks, so some scriptable interface is wanted, and that's where Perl often
comes in... I think in part because engineers often want to understand
and/or make minor modifications to their tools, and somehow - in my
experience - Perl seems to be the scripting language most compatible
with a typical engineer's mind set :)