Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

One-Liners: Simple Calculator

Ever needed to do a little math really quick, the sort of thing that's too complex to do in your head? I normally keep a calculator around for just these reasons, but my desk is really messy (one of the occupational hazards of being a writer), and I'm lucky if I can find stuff I really need. My computer, like all computers, comes with an online calculator, but because I'm often sitting working with Perl at a command line I can type faster than I can pull down a menu.

With one-liners, Perl enables your computer to become the most complicated basic calculator in the world.

% perl
						-e 'print 154/7'
22

Note

Don't forget, on Windows, use double quotes, not single quotes after the -e.

This isn't a very elegant one-liner. ...