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I have a directory with about thirty text files. I was trying to find an acronym in the directory, but I didn't really remember what it was (other than it was a four letter word starting with M).

I tried a few one-liners, but none of them worked. Since I was just trying to find something really quickly, I decided to punt and just write a script to do what I wanted.

Now I'm trying to learn more about one-liners (I don't have any experience with them) just so I can handle this situation a bit better next time it comes up.

I should also note that I'm doing this from a Windows command prompt.

Here are some of the one-liners that I tried (in a for loop, single file example shown here):

perl -pe "m/M[A-Z]{3} /" 1-01.txt
Outputs the source file exactly.
perl -pe "if (m/(M[A-Z]{3}) /) { print $1; }" 1-01.txt
Outputs the source file exactly.

And finally, here's the subroutine that actally did what I wanted:

my @files = <*.txt>;
undef $/;
foreach (@files) {
   open ( FH, $_ );
   my $txt = <FH>;
   close ( FH );
   while ( $txt =~ m/(M[A-Z]{3}) /gs ) { print "  $1\n"; }
}
[download]

Is there a way to do something like this as a one-liner? If so, then can I incorporate the glob into the one-liner? Thanks for your help.

_{janitored by ybiC: Prepend tile wit "One-liner" for searchability}

In reply to One-liner for Matching a Regex in a Directory of Files by svsingh

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