[Novalug] Perl "one-liners" (was "Tutorials")

[Paul D. Bain]

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
> Joel Fouse wrote:
> 
>> I, for one, would love to have a little more understanding of awk
>> (beyond "ps -ef | awk '{print $2}'") and sed (beyond "echo 'foo' | sed
>> 's/foo/blah/'")
>>
>> - Joel
>>
> The chief reason for grokking awk is that certain vendor scripts are 
> written in it.

> Otherwise, awk is a Dead Language, caught between sh and Perl. You would 
> be better off learning how to use either of these languages effectively. 
> For example, the "print the second field" script above can be expressed 
> as a one-liner in Perl as: ps -ef | perl -lane 'print $F[1]'
> 
> and in sh as
> 
>    ps -ef |
>    while read one two rest
>    do
>        echo $two
>    done
> 
> And in fact, while it is possible to write the Tower of Hanoi program in 
> sed, the same comment applies: learn how to make effective use of shell 
> scripts, and at the first sign of complexity, leap directly to perl.
> 
> Of course, perhaps that advice should be the subject of a tutorial.

Jim,

	Thanks for this tip. Could you please point us to a collection of such 
Perl "one-liners" that replace awk, sed, and the like? I already have 
the O'Reilly "Perl Cookbook" and several similar Perl books, such as 
this one:

	David Cross, "Data munging with Perl" (Manning), ISBN 1-930110-00-6.

These books include a few one-liners (OL's) and other short scripts, but 
they tend to focus mostly on longer scripts and do not focus on OL's. Is 
there a CPAN for such OL's? If not, are there any bloggers who tend to 
write often about such matters? As you may know, blogger J. Zawodny 
often writes about MySQL matters -- does he have a counterpart in the 
world of Perl OL's?

--Paul Bain