Perl One-Liners

Chapter 5. Working With Arrays and Strings

In this chapter, we’ll look at various one-liners for creating strings and arrays, for doing things like generating passwords, creating strings of certain length, finding the numeric values of characters, and creating arrays of numbers. You’ll also learn about the range operator .., the x operator, the $, special variable, and the @ARGV array.

5.1 Generate and print the alphabet

perl -le 'print a..z'

This one-liner prints all letters from a to z in the English alphabet as abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. The letters are generated by the range operator .., which, when used on strings in the list context (provided here by print), applies the magical auto-increment algorithm that advances the string to the next ...