I was recently given the task of combing through 16,000 + files looking for those that were created by one employee. The only flag (since this is a Win95 peer/peer network we're talking about)(yeah, I know, but it pays the rent . . .:-), is the employee number buried in the file. The file is delimited by the character "³" (\xB3). The employee number in this case is 400. Here's the code I used:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

{
   $bucket = 0;
   $count  = 1;

   open (LOGFILE, ">>log.txt") || die "Can't open file: $!";
   while ($infile = glob("/biz/employee/data/*")) {
      open (INFILE, $infile) || die "Can't open file: $!";
      while (<INFILE>) {
         print "$count : ";
         if ($_ =~ /³400³/) {
            $bucket++;
            print "Found Employee $bucket times.\n";
            print LOGFILE ("$_\n");
         }
         else { print "\n"; }
         $count++;
      }
   }
   print "Finished. Found Employee $bucket time in $count files. \n";
}
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I know it's more of a "mundane use for Perl", but it was my first truly fuctional Perl script, and using it I was able to hand my boss the list he wanted in a day instead of longer. As far as I'm concerned, that's cool. Simplicus.