MatchText, MatchChunk and the needle in the haystack

[Peter Alcibiades]

There is a wonderful book I just found for this sort of thing, and am working 
through:  Minimal Perl, by Tim Maher.  

Awk is great, terse, powerful, but a bit opaque.  And more up to date people 
always seem to talk about using Perl for what awk always was used for.  Well, 
if you ever felt you too should come up to date, got tired of pitying looks 
when you mentioned awk, took up some materials on Perl and then threw up your 
hands in despair, get Minimal Perl.  Clear, practical, easy, and with a focus 
on one liners of exactly the sort that you'd use in the situation on this 
thread. 

You could call it 'Perl for the rest of us'....  Text manipulation without 
tears.

Peter