The perl here is not really that crazy to remember. -a autosplits each line by whitespace and puts each element into the array F (this was inspired by AWK). -

The perl here is not really that crazy to remember. -a autosplits each line by whitespace and puts each element into the array F (this was inspired by AWK). -n loops through each line of the file, and -E executes the perl. $. (NR in AWK) is the line number. As others have noted, you can write the same thing in ruby on the command line already with `ruby -ane 'puts $F[1] if $.>1'` (Notice the similarities?) If you write one liners in AWK, Perl, or Ruby often the "odd" variables look more like useful shortcuts. *edit You could also write the perl without any of the special variables, but it would be much more verbose, hence the special characters and flags.