I still use Perl every now and again for powerful one-liners and I'm really glad it's around. Here is a bash function I use which takes args and merges and dedu

I still use Perl every now and again for powerful one-liners and I'm really glad it's around. Here is a bash function I use which takes args and merges and deduplicates PATH-like expressions: merge-args () { perl -e 'print join ":", grep {!$h{$_}++} split ":", join ":", @ARGV' "$@" } And I use as follows: export PATH="$(merge-args "${SCRIPT_DIR}"/clang-tidy-ex /usr/local/opt/llvm/bin "${INSTALL_DIR}"/{,samples/}bin "${PATH}")" ASAN_OPTIONS="$(merge-args "${ASAN_OPTIONS}" detect_leaks=1 check_initialization_order=1 detect_stack_use_after_return=1 strict_init_order=1 strict_string_checks=1 detect_odr_violation=0)" I know there are other ways of doing this in other languages and even in bash itself, but to me this is simple and elegant.