I have a question that I believe is perl enough oriented to justify posting (and I'm not looking for an answer, but more for advice).

Up until recently, I've had to lead my perl/web/programming life in an environment that offered what many would consider "crippled shell access". Now that I have full/typical access, my administrative life has changed ...

For years, I watched and noted as others talked about "one-liners", knowing that I was unable to take advantage of this aspect of box management. Now that the one-liner option is available to me, I'm looking for advice on resources that will bring me up to speed on this new tool.

Many times, I've looked at posts that offer one-liners, and my jaw drops at the amount of work that is performed from just one line of a command. But just about every time my jaw drops, I also realize that I have no clue how to interpret the one-liner. Resources that help me understand these types of one-liners is what I'm looking for.

I figure that since system calls like:

system "(nice /usr/local/bin/zip -r -q $storage_path $copy_path)";
[download]

are part of how I'd use the one-liners, my question qualifies as an appropriate perl question for the Monks.

Any and all suggestions are appreciated.

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