Generally good stuff, but my personal taste for the command-line stuff would run more towards awk -- it's lighter weight and easier to pick up than full-blown p

Generally good stuff, but my personal taste for the command-line stuff would run more towards awk -- it's lighter weight and easier to pick up than full-blown perl. On the other hand, if you're going to do a lot of this stuff it's worth tracking down a copy of "Data Munging with Perl" by David Cross ( http://www.manning.com/cross/ http://www.manning.com/cross/ ) which, while slightly out of date (it covers classic Perl 5 OOP, not New Perl) gives a solid grounding in how to do almost all of this stuff entirely within Perl.