Moving from sed to perl for one-liner operations on the command line (esp. in pipes) will be a lot easier once you get acquainted with the relevant option flags for perl -- browse through perlrun for a wealth of opportunities.

Anything you would do with sed -- and a lot more that is hard to conceive of with sed -- is possible using "-e script" along with "-p" or "-n"; awk-ish stuff is done using "-a"; and "-l" can be very handy, as is -M.

For lots of simple things, sed is still likely to involve fewer characters to type on the command line (and of course it's likely to run a bit faster), but a lot of things are really not feasible in sed or awk (using executable code in as part of a regex replacement, handling non-ascii character data, etc), but end up being pretty short work in perl.

(BTW, I prefer unix "find" because, on any file tree of appreciable size -- thousands of files -- File::Find took about 5 times longer the last time I checked.)

In reply to Re^3: Parsing a list of files to see if any contain any one of a list of comma delimited strings by graff
in thread Parsing a list of files to see if any contain any one of a list of comma delimited strings by OfficeLinebacker

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