That's a very comprehensive solution with substantially more functionality than I needed. It probably deserves its own CUFP page.

Wow, very impressive! ... agree with kcott that it deserves its own CUFP page.

I played briefly with your command on Ubuntu using perl v5.38:

~/pm/Tux$ perl -CEO -wE'say "\x{1F468}\x{1F3FD}\x{200D}\x{2708}\x{FE0F}"'
👨🏽‍✈️

~/pm/Tux$ echo -e '\U1F468\U1F3FD\U200D\U2708\UFE0F'
👨🏽‍✈️

AFAICT, the output from the perl -CEO and the bash echo -e commands above is identical, namely:

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[download]

Running this command produced useful output (that seems to match yours), despite the error messages:

~/pm/Tux$ echo -e '\U1F468\U1F3FD\U200D\U2708\UFE0F' | xargs uchar -v
Can't exec "locate": No such file or directory at ~/pm/Tux/uchar line 103.
👨 U1f468 \N{MAN}
🏽 U1f3fd \N{EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4}
‍ U0200d \N{ZERO WIDTH JOINER}
✈ U02708 \N{AIRPLANE}
️ U0fe0f \N{VARIATION SELECTOR-16}

Using CODE blocks intead of pre:

~/pm/Tux$ echo -e '\U1F468\U1F3FD\U200D\U2708\UFE0F' | xargs uchar -v
Can't exec "locate": No such file or directory at ~/pm/Tux/uchar line 
+103.
👨 U1f468 \N{MAN}
🏽 U1f3fd \N{EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4}
‍ U0200d \N{ZERO WIDTH JOINER}
✈ U02708 \N{AIRPLANE}
️ U0fe0f \N{VARIATION SELECTOR-16}
[download]

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Fetch again. Now guarded. /me wonders how people work on a devel machine without mlocate :)


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

> /me wonders how people work on a devel machine without mlocate :)

Let me try to explain why I'd never heard of mlocate. :)

We run the identical version of Perl with an identical set of CPAN modules on our many different Unix boxes (multiple versions of: AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Digital UNIX, Tru64 UNIX, IRIX, UnixWare, SCO Unix, ...).

-- from Re: putting perl and modules in your source code repository

When your typical work day for over twenty years has been spread across Windows boxes and many different Unix flavours, you naturally lean towards standard POSIX commands (such as find and xargs), rather than system-specific ones (such as locate/mlocate), because you know they're available out-of-the-box everywhere.

Better, as indicated at Unix shell versus Perl, is to avoid a motley mix of Unix shell and Windows batch scripts by writing everything in Perl ("It's easier to port a shell than a shell script").

If I had a job where I spent most of my day on a Linux development machine, it would make sense to invest considerable time in mastering Linux-specific dev tools (interested to learn BTW if you get to spend most of your work day beavering away on a Linux dev box).

Now that I know about mlocate I might get around to installing it at home on my Ubuntu VM - more likely if you, or some other kind Perl monk, sold me with some examples of how it makes development more enjoyable. :)

Updated: minor changes to wording.

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Thanks! Your new version is working nicely for me now.

BTW, I found by experimenting that it seems to work fine for my simple needs even without xargs:

~/pm/Tux$ echo -e '\U1F468\U1F3FD\U200D\U2708\UFE0F' | xargs ./uchar -v
👨 U1f468 \N{MAN}
🏽 U1f3fd \N{EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4}
‍ U0200d \N{ZERO WIDTH JOINER}
✈ U02708 \N{AIRPLANE}
️ U0fe0f \N{VARIATION SELECTOR-16}

~/pm/Tux$ ./uchar -v '\U1F468\U1F3FD\U200D\U2708\UFE0F'
👨 U1f468 \N{MAN}
🏽 U1f3fd \N{EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4}
‍ U0200d \N{ZERO WIDTH JOINER}
✈ U02708 \N{AIRPLANE}
️ U0fe0f \N{VARIATION SELECTOR-16}

Update: Note that \U1F3FD (🏽) is EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4 : skin color modifier character representing skin type 4 from the Fitzpatrick scale, used above to change the skin color of the airline pilot. Also used by Discipulus to change the skin color of man student at Re: Emojis for Perl Monk names (Discipulus and SpaceCowboy and LanX).

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