What part can't you figure out?

• perl -- runs perl
• -wpe "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g" -- passes in the following command line arguments:
  • w -- enable warnings (p.502);
  • p -- loop this script around each input line (p.499); and
  • e "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g" -- some search and replace regular expression.
    • This regexp takes an input line and looks for \b;([mnst]), captures whatever it finds inside the brackets, and replaces it with '$1, where $1 is the thing it captured. The \b is a backspace key (p.161) word boundary, capturing and clustering is covered on p.182, using square brackets to define a list of characters is covered on p.201.

So what does it do? My interpretation is that it looks for a backspace word boundary, followed by a semi-colon, followed by any one of 'm', 'n', 's' or 't', and replaces that with an apostrophe followed by the alpha character that it found. It does this globally on the line.

So it probably allows belg4mit to clean up text files where he hit the ; instead of the ', since they're next to each other on his keyboard (as they are on mine.

Did you figure out the part that you missed now?

Update: As my learned brothers NetWallah and VenTatsu point out, \b is not a backspace in this context but a word boundary. Thanks brothers.

Update 2: Again, as DigitalKitty has pointed out, my conslusion doesn't include the corrections described in my first update. Hope fully these updates don't get longer than the original post. :(

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.