perl

Perl date FAQ: Can you share a Perl date example where you print a date in a decent human-readable format?

Update: Be sure to look at the comments below for some great Perl "one liners", i.e., one-line solutions to this problem.

In this blog I'll share the source code for a Perl program that takes nagios.logrecords as input, then outputs the records with a human-readable date format. More specifically, the input records look like this:

Summary: This page is a printf formatting cheat sheet. I originally created this cheat sheet for my own purposes, and then thought I would share it here.

A cool thing about the printf formatting syntax is that the specifiers you can use are very similar, if not identical, between several different languages, including C, C++, Java, Perl, Ruby, and others, so your knowledge is reusable, which is a good thing.

Perl "grep array" FAQ: Can you demonstrate a Perl grep array example? (Related: Can you demonstrate how to search a Perl array?)

A very cool thing about Perl is that you can search lists (arrays) with the Perl grep function. This makes it very easy to find things in large lists -- without having to write your own Perl for/foreach loops.

This announcement is a little premature, but ... for at least ten years I've thought about creating a search engine to make it easier to find source code examples, and while Google and thousands of writers have pretty much eliminated the need for such a search engine, I decided to create one anyway. The approach I'm working on is to create a source code search engine that is driven by "tags", in much the same way that del.icio.us and other tag concepts work.

Perl write to file FAQ: Can you demonstrate an example of how to write to a file in Perl?

Somehow I managed to go all these years without showing a simple Perl "write to file" example. Let's fix that.

Perl "write to file" example

Here's a short snippet of code that shows how to write to a file in Perl: