A friend of mine uses a shareware utility for Windows that mirrors web sites so that you can browse them offline. This utility (unfortunately) adds some sort of banner to each downloaded page; the banner is delimited by two html comments. Here is an example: 
<!-- inserted banner -->
<TABLE>
blah
blah
</TABLE>
<!-- end of inserted banner -->

[download]
My friend wanted to remove this banner ... so I wrote a nice perl script for him. The script traverses the whole directory tree of the downloaded site and removes the html lines that create the banner from each page.
The first version of my script used a recursive procedure to go through all the files, read each line skipping those unwanted, and than wrote the file back.
Than I realized that I could use File::Find, so I started rewriting the script. In the meanwhile I was sort of enlightened: the .. operator appeared in my mind, and I realized I could use that too. So here is the second version of my script 
use strict;
use File::Find;

die "usage $0 <dir>" unless (@ARGV == 1 && -d $ARGV[0]);
find (
    sub {
        return unless -f $_;
        open (FILE, "< $_") or warn "cannot read $_\n" and return;
        my @lines = grep {!(/inserted banner/i .. /end of inserted ban
+ner/i)} <FILE>;
        close (FILE);
        open (FILE, "> $_") or warn "cannot write $_\n" and return;
        print FILE @lines;
        close (FILE);        
   },
   $ARGV[0]
);

[download]
It works pretty well, and I'm quite happy with that ... and my friend is happy too :). Anyway in the process of continuous learning I started thinking of rewriting again the script to take advantage of -p command switch, and here is what I ended up with: 
perl -MFile::Find -pi.bak -e "BEGIN {find sub {-f && push @ARGV, $File
+::Find::name}, \".\"} 
if (/inserted banner/i) {while (<>) {s/.*// and last if /end of insert
+ed banner/i;}}"

[download]
Moral: there is more than one way to do it :)
marcos

In reply to Marcos' Meditation by marcos

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