That's why you setup your shell with abbrevs and all you have to type is ,p2 or what not to have it expanded into | perl -lane 'print $F[2]' for you when you hit the space key.

(OK, technically I have ,2 which expands to | awk '{print $2}' which I use more often out of habit; but I've also got ,pa which expands out to | perl -lane, and thinking it over during the reply I may try making one that expands to | perl -lane 'print $F[~]' where the ~ is where the cursor is left after expansion a la TextMate snippets)