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I often use the following arguments to perl:

• -e Makes the line of code be executed instead of a script
• -n Forces your line to be called in a loop. Allows you to take lines from the diamond operator (or stdin)
• -p Forces your line to be called in a loop. Prints $_ at the end

• This counts the number of quotation marks in each line and prints it

  perl -ne '$cnt = tr/"//;print "$cnt\n"' inputFileName.txt

• Adds string to each line, followed by tab

  perl -pe 's/(.*)/string\t$1/' inFile > outFile

• Append a new line to each line

  perl -pe 's//\n/' all.sent.classOnly > all.sent.classOnly.sep

• Replace all occurrences of pattern1 (e.g. [0-9]) with pattern2

  perl -p -i.bak -w -e 's/pattern1/pattern2/g' inputFile

• Go through file and only print words that do not have any uppercase letters.

  perl -ne 'print unless m/[A-Z]/' allWords.txt > allWordsOnlyLowercase.txt

• Go through file, split line at each space and print words one per line.

  perl -ne 'print join("\n", split(/ /,$_));print("\n")' someText.txt > wordsPerLine.txt

• or in other words, delete every character that is not a letter, white space or line end (replace with nothing)

  perl -pne 's/[^a-zA-Z\s]*//g' text_withSpecial.txt > text_lettersOnly.txt

• perl -pne 'tr/[A-Z]/[a-z]/' textWithUpperCase.txt > textwithoutuppercase.txt;

• Print only the second column of the data when using tabular as a separator

  perl -ne '@F = split("\t", $_); print "$F[1]";' columnFileWithTabs.txt > justSecondColumn.txt

• One-Liner: Sort lines by their length

  perl -e 'print sort {length $a <=> length $b} <>' textFile

• One-Liner: Print second column, unless it contains a number

  perl">perl -lane 'print $F[1] unless $F[1] =~ m/[0-9]/' wordCounts.txt