Today I had the task of removing a few entries from a CSV file based on another CSV file. It was only about 300 rows that needed to be removed in a file of about 2000 rows, so I could have manually done it in about an hour. Since it is Saturday, I decided to have fun, write a Perl script to do it even if it took longer than doing it manually.
Before you laugh at the fact that I thought it might take me over an hour to write a Perl script, understand I haven’t done anything in Perl in about 2 years.
After about 15 minutes, I had a perfectly working script. Perl really is one of the easiest and fastest ways to do file and string manipulation. Unfortunately, it might be another 2 years before I need to use it again. Either way, it feels great to complete a task quickly and efficiently, which is probably the entire reason Larry Wall created Perl.