Those are substitutions with regular expressions. The first one removes everything from the first colon to the newline character while the second turns the newlines into commas.

See Pattern Matching, Regular Expressions, and Parsing in our tutorials section, perlretut and perlre in perldoc for some references.

In reply to Re^3: parse /etc/passwd and output it as csv in hundred servers by hippo
in thread parse /etc/passwd and output it as csv in hundred servers by garcimo

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