Here is a random thought that struck me last night. I've mulled it over for a bit, and it doesn't seem worse than it originally did, so I'm putting it up for discussion to see if other people agree.

I tend to use Perl as a grep on steroids. All that you have to do is: 

perl -ne 'print if _____' somefile

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and it works like grep, except that the condition can be written in Perl. I use this when I want to use a complex regular expression and I can't be bothered to remember how grep's differ from Perl's. I also use this when I want a condition that I can readily write in code.

That is fine, except that GNU grep does something that I really like. If you type: 

grep -r foo bar

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then it will recursively search through bar and grep for "foo" in each file. No need to mess around with find. No need to mess around with File::Find. Just a simple -r and It Just Works.

Who else would find it convenient if Perl, when it was invoked with -r, would take what is to become your @ARGS and recursively walk the directory tree to expand it out? That way my "grep on steroids" would trivially have the same feature that I have come to know and love in GNU's version of grep.

I'd appreciate a similar optional feature built into glob in some way...

In reply to Useful addition to Perl? by tilly

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