SPUG:Best One-Liners and Scripts for UNIX

[Michael R. Wolf]

Tim Maher <tim at consultix-inc.com> writes:


[...]

>    * 5 Perl One-liners All Unix/Linux Users Should Know
>    * 3 Perl Scripts UNIX/Linux Users Shouldn't Live Without
>    * How Perl's Looping Facilities Compare to the Shell's

Better late than never.

Here's one of my favorite idioms

    while(<>) {
        next if /^\s*#/;		# skip shell-like comment lines
        next if /^\s*$/;		# skip blank lines

        # process data here
    }

I often use it as
    while(<DATA>) {
        ...
    }

to read in some "magic" data from the DATA filehandle.

This has come in very handy in many cases. I love to add whitespace to
my data, breaking it into readable paragraphs. And I like to *disable*
rather than *remove* the data -- it's so much easier to *enable* it
than to *create* it from scratch.

-- 
Michael R. Wolf
    All mammals learn by playing!
        MichaelRunningWolf at att.net