I rarely use Perl for what Perl was originally (like in the 16:th century or something) built for; extracting and reporting. But today I did. And it was cool in all it's simplicity and usefulness.
Read through some files based on a filename regexp, identify the file, find some values, and summarize them in a table using MoinMoin (it's a Wiki) formatting. 20 minutes, including blocking some values, and providing aliases for some, and tweaking the table formatting. No longer than it would have taken me to do it manually, only:
* It wasn't boring
* It was correct, no chance to slip up
* It can be done again at any time with updated files.
Oh, the joy of small scale automation :)
BTW, I also re-coded my canonical read-contents-of-a-file for the n:th time (I tend to do that in sooo many small scripts).
sub loadFile {
my ($file) = @_;
local $/;
open(my $fh, $file) or return("");
return(<$fh>);
}
File::Slurp isn't in the distribution, right? Well... it should.
Or something not entirely dissimilar to that.use IO::File;
my @lines = IO::File->new(shift)->getlines;
