Perl One-Liners: 130 Programs That Get Things Done

Part of the fun of programming in Perl lies in tackling tedious tasks with short, efficient, and reusable code. Often, the perfect tool is the one-liner, a small but powerful program that fits in one line of code and does one thing really well.

In Perl One-Liners, author and impatient hacker Peteris Krumins takes you through more than 100 compelling one-liners that do all sorts of handy things, such as manipulate line spacing, tally column values in a table, and get a list of users on a system. This cookbook of useful, customizable, and fun scripts will even help hone your Perl coding skills, as Krumins dissects the code to give you a deeper understanding of the language.

You’ll find one-liners that:

• Encode, decode, and convert strings
• Generate random passwords
• Calculate sums, factorials, and the mathematical constants π and e
• Add or remove spaces
• Number lines in a file
• Print lines that match a specific pattern
• Check to see if a number is prime with a regular expression
• Convert IP address to decimal form
• Replace one string with another

And many more! Save time and sharpen you coding skills as you learn to conquer those pesky tasks in a few precisely placed keystrokes with Perl One-Liners.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction to Perl One-Liners
Chapter 2. Spacing
Chapter 3. Numbering
Chapter 4. Calculations
Chapter 5. Working with Arrays and Strings
Chapter 6. Text Conversion and Substitution
Chapter 7. Selectively Printing and Deleting Lines
Chapter 8. Useful Regular Expressions

Appendix A. Perl’s Special Variables
Appendix B. Using Perl One-Liners on Windows
Appendix C. perl1line.txt