pl - Perl One-Liner Magic Wand
Some tasks are too menial for a dedicated script, but still too cumbersome
even with the many neat one-liner options of "perl -E". This small script
fills the gap: various one-letter commands & magic variables (with meaningful
aliases too) and more nifty loop options take Perl programming to the command
line. Fully imports List::Util. With no program on the command line, starts
a pl Shell.
How to "e(cho)" values, including from "@A(RGV)", with single "$q(uote)" &
double "$Q(uote)". Same for hard-to-print values:
pl 'echo "${quote}Perl$quote", "$Quote@ARGV$Quote"' one liner
pl 'e "${q}Perl$q", "$Q@A$Q"' one liner
pl 'echo \"Perl", \@ARGV, undef' one liner
pl 'e \"Perl", \@A, undef' one liner
Loop over args, printing each with line ending. And same, SHOUTING:
pl -opl '' Perl one liner
pl -opl '$_ = uc' Perl one liner
Print up to 3 matching lines, resetting count (and "$.") for each file:
pl -rP3 '/Perl.*one.*liner/' file*
Count hits in magic statistics hash "%N(UMBER)":
pl -n '++$NUMBER{$1} while /(Perl|one|liner)/g' file*
pl -n '++$N{$1} while /(Perl|one|liner)/g' file*
Though they are sometimes slightly, sometimes quite a bit more complicated,
most Perl one-liners from the internet work, just by omitting "-e" or "-E".
Known minor differences are:
* don't "goto LINE", but "next LINE" is fine
* in a "-n" loop "last" is per file instead of behaving like "exit"
* using "pop", etc. to implicitly modify "@A(RGV)" works in "-B" begin code,
but not in your main program (which gets compiled to a function)
* shenanigans with unbalanced braces won't work