SPUG: Perl One-Liners

Richard Anderson Richard.Anderson at seaslug.org
Mon Jan 10 23:25:07 CST 2000


Tom Christianson's canonical list of one-line perl programs:

    # run debugger "stand-alone"
    perl -d -e 42

    # just check syntax, with warnings
    perl -wc my_file

    # useful at end of "find foo -print"
    perl -nle unlink

    # simplest one-liner program
    perl -e 'print "hello world!\n"'

    # add first and penultimate columns
    perl -lane 'print $F[0] + $F[-2]'

    # just lines 15 to 17
    perl -ne 'print if 15 .. 17' *.pod

    # in-place edit of *.c files changing all foo to bar
    perl -p -i.bak -e 's/\bfoo\b/bar/g' *.c

    # command-line that prints the first 50 lines (cheaply) 
    perl -pe 'exit if $. > 50' f1 f2 f3 ...

    # delete first 10 lines
    perl -i.old -ne 'print unless 1 .. 10' foo.txt

    # change all the isolated oldvar occurrences to newvar
    perl -i.old -pe 's{\boldvar\b}{newvar}g' *.[chy]

    # command-line that reverses the whole file by lines
    perl -e 'print reverse <>' file1 file2 file3 ....

    # find palindromes
    perl -lne 'print if $_ eq reverse' /usr/dict/words

    # command-line that reverse all the bytes in a file
    perl -0777e 'print scalar reverse <>' f1 f2 f3 ...

    # command-line that reverses the whole file by paragraphs
    perl -00 -e 'print reverse <>' file1 file2 file3 ....

    # increment all numbers found in these files
    perl i.tiny -pe 's/(\d+)/ 1 + $1 /ge' file1 file2 ....

    # command-line that shows each line with its characters backwards
    perl -nle 'print scalar reverse $_' file1 file2 file3 ....

    # delete all but lines beween START and END
    perl -i.old -ne 'print unless /^START$/ .. /^END$/' foo.txt

    # binary edit (careful!)
    perl -i.bak -pe 's/Mozilla/Slopoke/g' /usr/local/bin/netscape

    # look for dup words
    perl -0777 -ne 'print "$.: doubled $_\n" while /\b(\w+)\b\s+\b\1\b/gi'

    # command-line that prints the last 50 lines (expensively)
    perl -e '@lines = <>; print @lines[ $#lines .. $#lines-50' f1 f2 f3 ...

Richard.Anderson at seaslug.org
www.zipcon.net/~starfire/home (personal)
www.raycosoft.com (corporate)


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