Minimal Perl

Chapter 8. Scripting techniques

8.1	Exploiting script-oriented functions	248
8.2	Pre-processing arguments	256
8.3	Executing code conditionally with if/else	259
8.4	Wrangling strings with concatenation and repetition operators	265
8.5	Interpolating command output into source code	269
8.6	Executing OS commands using system	275
8.7	Evaluating code using eval	283
8.8	Summary	292

Those nifty one-line commands you saw in part 1 are easy to type, and they’re adequate for an impressively wide variety of common tasks. And gosh darn it, you might even say they’re cute, if not downright elegant.

But sooner or later, you’ll need to write programs that can validate their arguments, handle arguments that aren’t filenames, capture and manipulate outputs from Unix commands, process inputs ...