Yep, you're right. Perl *does* rule.

My motivation really came about when wrestling with a mixture of different ticks from a shell for loop and an awk command in that article.. this didn't work:

# for i in 'file * | grep "ASCII C program text" | \
                              awk -F: '{print $1}'`;
                    do mv $i $i.c; done
[download]

The different ticks are tricky. You can try it by erasing "C program text" and changing mv to echo. Hmm, still not sure if that should work or not.

Anyway, now instead of always relying on perl -pi (which also rules, let it be said) I feel personally a little more comfortable with piped operations on lists of files on the command line. Though I find that some shell tools pad output to both left and right justify at the same time.. this is a bad thing and Perl is still what I use for gardening.