much of the code in the Scriptome would make an excellent tutorial on Perl one-liners

I would not be so quick about excellence.

Take for example, this page

perl -ne 'BEGIN {$col=1}' -e 's/\r?\n//; @F=split /\t/, $_; $sum += $F
+[$col]; 
END {warn "Sum of column $col for $. lines\n"; print "$sum\n"}' file.t
+ab
[download]

I see an inefficient replacement of newline, instead of chomp. But since this is a one-liner, the "-l" option will do instead, and it will also save the output newlines.

Then, the @F=split /\t/, $_; could be easily replaced by the "-a" autosplit option, which will happily take charge of different whitespace types, other than tabs.

I would say that this one-liner woult be better written as

perl -e 'BEGIN {$col=1}' -lane '$sum += $F[$col]; 
          END {print "Sum of column $col for $. line: $sum"}' file.tab
[download]

Or, I should even dare this:

perl -lane '$sum += $F[1]; END {print $sum}' file.tab
[download]

It's shorter, thus easier to write, and less mistakes to make when copying it.