I'd like to get my feet wet with Perl. Baby steps, just a little beyond "Hello World." I'd like to create a simple little app. I have a few questions... [more inside]
posted by circular on Jun 27, 2011 - 12 answers

Script-filter: I've been tasked with finding out who at our company is synchronizing to their home folders on our fileservers, and how often. Although initially it was recommended I do this in perl, my head is blowing up trying to get it to work. Lots of blundering attempts to ask for help inside. [more inside]
posted by routergirl on May 21, 2010 - 15 answers

I'm using a shell script to handle some excel docs by converting to csv and reformatting it a little bit. I'm having some difficulty going on with the next part of the script. Some help would be great. :) [more inside]
posted by fightoplankton on Jun 10, 2009 - 11 answers

I have a podcast that downloads as multiple segments over multiple days. Its format arrives as YYYYMMDD_showcode_segment.mp3; so, for example, one download might result in files as 20090323_goofa_01.mp3 through 20090323_goofa_21.mp3, and also within the same download 20090324_goofa_01.mp3 through 20090324_goofa_21.mp3. What I'm looking for is a Unix script (shell, perl, what have you) that would look at a directory and look at what dates are represented there, and let me join all of the segments together by day. I can use mpgtx -j to do the actual joining; I'm looking for the code that would let the script determine what dates are in the directory and then get each day's segments united into a single MP3 for that day's show.
posted by WCityMike on Mar 25, 2009 - 5 answers

Faster techniques for grabbing lines of a file and doing text manipulation and arithmetic via shell (or other) scripting? [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon on May 9, 2008 - 20 answers

I would basically like to rip off, wholesale, some command-line script which will provide me a countdown -- only in days. No years, months, minutes, or seconds. Unfortunately, adapting an existing script is beyond my ken. [more inside]
posted by WCityMike on Sep 27, 2007 - 5 answers

Is there a script (perl or php, no MySQL because I don't understand it and don't want to learn it) that password-protects a webpage so that it can be viewed only by someone who logs in with a username and a password, and also logs that user, so that you can have a record (very important) of who's viewed the page? If so, where can I get me one?
posted by iconomy on Jan 26, 2005 - 11 answers

Due to "security concerns," my web host provider has just banned two Form-to-email scripts (Formmail and NMS Formmail). Now I'm hard up to find a replacement. Any ideas? I'd prefer a solution that doesn't require a mastery of PERL to configure.
posted by Pinwheel on Jan 17, 2005 - 4 answers

I am looking for a simple script (perl,php,whatever) or even binary utility that can programatically render graphical images in this manner: take XYZ font (true-type/postscript/whatever) and render an image with the text ABC.

Does such a thing exist?
posted by xmutex on Nov 12, 2004 - 13 answers

Any MeFi perl/cgi programmers feel like writing a few lines of code?

I need to add a function to an existing script, which looks like a piece of cake if you know perl.

Given a $newstring and a file of records, each consisting of a count and a string delimited by a space:

201 this.thing
23 that.thing
14 someother.thing
...

I need a function to check whether $newstring already exists in the file. If so, increment the count. If not, add a new record to the file with a count of 1. Finally, sort the file in descending order by count.

Maybe 5 minutes for you. Learning perl first for me. If it would be easier with fixed length counts like 0000201, that is fine, too.

If this is inappropriate for Ask MeFi, my apologies. I'll take it over to answers.google.
posted by Geo on Apr 29, 2004 - 10 answers

I'm trying to write a short Perl script under Mac OS X (Panther) to post to a Moveable Type weblog using the Atom API. After some initial problems with installing packages, I'm having this issue. [more inside] [more inside]
posted by mmangano on Feb 7, 2004 - 2 answers

I need a simple PHP/Perl script that displays the subjects of the last 10 emails in my inbox via an IMAP connection. I'd like to use it as an include on a personal portal page. [more inside] [more inside]
posted by machaus on Dec 11, 2003 - 7 answers