My advice is not be overly concerned about "one liners", especially if you are new to Perl. Some folks think that there is some huge execution efficiency by a "one liner". I believe that assumption to be false. You still have to fire up Perl itself and there is significant overhead with that. The extra overhead of reading some few lines from a .pl file makes no significant difference. Having an actual program file allows me to put some comments in there: who wrote it, when, what it does, what version of Perl it was tested on, perhaps a revision history... Many one liners can get pretty cryptic and that's a bad thing if you expect non-Perl'ers to use it. Writing tricky one liners is an art form unto itself. I am very skeptical that a beginner should start with that. Enjoy your Perl adventure!