TPJ One Liners

#40

A name game.

s<^([bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz]*)(\w+).*>
<$1$2 $1$2 $1o $1$2 / Bonana-Fanna-Fo-F$2 / 
Fe Fi Mo M$2 / $1$2!>i;

Courtesy of Sean M. Burke
appeared in Issue 15

#41

Extracting balanced parentheses from a string

gives you the parenthesized substrings in order of appearance:

(123 (456) (789) 0),(456),(789)
pars('()', "(123 (456) (789) 0)", 2)

in a list context gives you list of substrings, opened on level 2:

(456),(789)

in scalar context gives you the second substring:

(456)

Courtesy of Paul Clinger
appeared in Issue 15

#42

Extract unique elements from a list given a key function

sub unique (&@) {
  my($c,%hash) = shift;
  grep { not $hash{&$c}++ } @_
}

@list = unique { $_       } @list;  
# Remove duplicate strings from @list.

@obj  = unique { $_->name } @obj;   
# Only include one object for 
# for each name.

Courtesy of Don Schwarz
appeared in Issue 15

#43

Seven "Magic Cards." Have a friend think of a number from 1 to 100. Give them cards one at a time and ask if their number is on the card. Mentally sum the first digits of each card with a "yes" answer. Go into trance, say the magic word "Ultrix!" and announce their number. Known to win bar bets.

for $a(0..6){$b=1;for $c(1..100){if($c&2**$a){printf
"%3d ",$c;print"\n"if!($b++%10)}}print"\n\n\n"}

Courtesy of Bill Huston
appeared in Issue 15

#44

Asteroid 2000 BF19 was thought to be on a potentially dangerous approach path for us Terrans, with a possible impact in 2022. A Perl program called clomon.pl showed that the asteroid cannot come any closer than 0.038 AU for the next fifty years. Sleep tight!

-Based on email from Andrea Milani and Scott Manley
appeared in Issue 17

#45

Tracking the progress of a file as it downloads:

perl -e 'BEGIN{$|=1;$f=$ARGV[0];$s=(stat$f)[7];$t=time}
	    while(sleep 1){printf"\r$f %s bytes at %.2f Kb/s   ",
        $_=(stat$f)[7],($_-$s)/1024/(time-$t)}' 

your_downloading_file

-Courtesy Philippe Bruhat
appeared in Issue 17

#46

A full list of installed (but nonstandard) modules, and where they are located:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;                            # all variables must be declared
use Getopt::Std;                       # import the getopts method
use ExtUtils::Installed;               # import the package

use vars qw($opt_l $opt_s);            # declaring the two option switches
&getopts('ls');                        # $opt_l and $opt_s are set to 1 or 0
unless($opt_l or $opt_s) {             # unless one switch is true (1)
  die "pmods: A utility to list all installed (nonstandard) modules\n",
      "  Usage: pmods.pl -l  # list each module and all its directories\n",
      "        pmods.pl -s  # list just the module names\n";
}

my $inst  = ExtUtils::Installed->new();
foreach my $mod ( $inst->modules() ) { # foreach of the installed modules
  my $ver = $inst->version($mod);      # version number of the module
     $ver = ($ver) ? $ver : 'NONE';    # for clean operation
  print "MODULE: $mod version $ver\n"; # print module names
  map { print "  $_\n" } $inst->directories($mod) if($opt_l);
}

-Courtesy William H. Asquith et al.
appeared in Issue 17

#47

Print a message if a daylight savings time change occurs within the next 5 days:

print "\aTIME CHANGE COMING!\n"
    if (localtime(time))[8] ne (localtime(time+5*24*60*60))[8];

-Courtesy J.D. Laub

#48

Reverse for syntax to print out Perl's include path:

perl -e 'print "$_\n" for @INC'

appeared in Issue 17

#49

You can create a reference to a scalar like so:

   $ref = \$var;

In recent versions of Perl, you can also say:

   $ref = *var{SCALAR};

The same holds for other data types.

appeared in Issue 17