in reply to Perl/grep speed comparison

I don't see the kind of difference on my machine (G4 iBook running Mac OS X 10.5) as you do (I'm using a 30K file of all 'x's): 
radar:~ datchley$ time grep "." myfile >/dev/null

real    0m0.989s
user    0m0.821s
sys    0m0.078s
radar:~ datchley$ time perl -ne '/./' myfile >/dev/null

real    0m0.020s
user    0m0.006s
sys    0m0.013s

[download]
How big is your file, what machine?

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echo S 1 [ Y V U | perl -ane 'print reverse map { $_ = chr(ord($_)-1) } @F;'
Warning: Any code posted by tuxz0r is untested, unless otherwise stated, and is used at your own risk.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom