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. :(