I'm already using Ruby for this. It's great for making little scripts and utilities to automate things and glue things together. Being able to interface with just about anything without much boilerplate while also having all of the tools of a high-end language make it really nice. Performance may not be as great - I don't know how it compares to Perl - but it's rarely an issue for these sorts of tasks. You could be 10x slower and still not notice the difference.