Learn one Perl command

A while back I wrote a post Learn one sed command. In a nutshell, I said it’s worth learning sed just do commands of the form sed s/foo/bar/ to replace “foo” with “bar.”

Dan Haskin and Will Fitzgerald suggested in their comments that instead of sed use perl -pe with the same command. The advantage is that you could use Perl’s more powerful regular expression syntax. Will said he uses Perl like this:

    cat file | perl -lpe "s/old/new/g" > newfile

I think they’re right. Except for the simplest regular expressions, sed’s regular expression syntax is too restrictive. For example, I recently needed to remove commas that immediately follow a digit and this did the trick:

    cat file | perl -lpe "s/(?<=\d),//g" > newfile

Since sed does not have the look-behind feature or d for digits, the corresponding sed code would be more complicated.

I quit writing Perl years ago. I don’t miss Perl as a whole, but I do miss Perl’s regular expression support.

Learning Perl is a big commitment, but just learning Perl regular expressions is not. Perl is the leader in regular expression support, and many programming languages implement a subset of Perl’s regex features. You could just use a subset of Perl features you already know, but you’d have the option of using more features.

11 thoughts on “Learn one Perl command

  1. FWIW, that’s a useless use of cat. You can do:
    perl -pe “s/(? newfile

    (In particular, Windows users may have perl but no cat.)

    And if you just want to do it in-place, with a backup to “file.bak”:
    perl -pi.bak -e “s/(?<=d),//g" file

  2. I still find myself using sed for its in-place feature: sed -i '' 's/foo/bar/' file.txt

    I haven’t found any other way to do in-place editing without writing a whole script.

  3. There is an even better way. Perl allows in-place editing with -i. This argument takes an optional suffix to append to the original files.

    This means that you can do your search/replace on a bunch of files and have backups in one line.

    perl -pi.bak -e "s///g"

    Of course, if you do not want backups, just leave off the suffix. Every file will be edited in place and no backups created.

    perl -pi -e "s///g"

    This is how to get a nice slice of Perl Pie (-pi -e).

  4. I stopped writing new scripts in Perl a while ago, but I still use these sorts of Perl one liners all the time. I never switched to sed for more or less the same reasons: I already know Perl pretty well; and it’s much more powerful.

  5. g: the * notation allows for 0 or more instances. So the first [0-9] is needed to be sure there is at least one digit and the second [0-9] swallows any additional digits.

  6. Philip: I understand the meaning of Magnum’s RE, but the point is that “if you have 1 or more digits followed by a comma, replace them with the same digits and then a space” is equivalent to “if you have one digit followed by a comma, replace that with the same digit followed by a space”. It’s not matching the same set of characters, but it is making the same change. Unless I’m being stupid, of course, which is entirely possible.

  7. There are people in the world with nothing better to do than compile
    lists of dummy uses of the `cat’ command, as in that example, and pour
    scorn on them, but I’ll just have to brave it out.

    From the User’s Guide to zsh

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