In the few weeks that I've been able to use Perl at work (I'm a COBOL programmer by trade...let the cringes begin), I've found Perl to be quite a timesaver in more than one occasion. Case in point: I have a program which generates a CSV file. I got a complaint that the amounts in the CSV file did not add up correctly, so therefore the data file was corrupt. With about 20-30 lines of code, and the Text::CSV_XS module, I had written a validator for the file, and showed the output to the complainer. As a doublecheck, I brought the file into Excel and did the calculations there. Things added up, and people were happy. Had I needed to code a COBOL program to do this, it probably would have taken me twice as long than the Perl script did.

I've also written a utility to go through our source codebase and search for various keywords / phrases. I'm sure I could have installed grep in cygwin or something along those lines, but I needed a nifty little report plus a listing of the actual source lines. So, I whipped up another script, and got the desired output. Perl has been a great timesaver at work, and at home, it's helping me get things done as well.

In reply to Perl: Quite a workhorse by FubarPA

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