Yeah, it was definitely a lot... but the goal was exposure -- "there exists these set of commands to do your work for you" and not actually being able to talk the talk and go script stuff.

Luckily the whole audience (~dozen) had at least basic linux/programming experience so it wasn't starting from "this is a prompt" or anything..
They seemed to be following the two real-life chemistry data file examples at least..

I used (my own hacked up version since it doesn't have much in terms of config options) Pod::Pdf to create a nice PDF version to print up for them.

cool -- i actually didn't know about perlrequick -- i knew i'd learn something from replies to this post! :)