Thank you. That was a great explanation! It made me understand better what's going on in principle. You are right, Hubski's formatting messed up the example. Unfortunately, for some reason the verbatim option did not work, it just printed the character in front of my text but still interpreted the * and | as syntax. Anyways, I take away from this that regular expressions are something I may definitely want to look into in the future (preferably using a tutorial "from the ground up"), but don't really need to worry about for the moment.
Yes, I agree. The first step is to understand what needs to be done. Anyone who tells you that you need to learn the most obscure and unreadable perl one-liners to be a True Linux User is full of shit. Those one-liners make no sense unless you are already familiar with the sorts of editing tasks that you might need to do in the first place.
Does anyone ever say that? When I hand out a line noisey incantation without much explanation it's usually something that would require a lot of explanation and in response to someone who sounds like they just want their problem to go away.Anyone who tells you that you need to learn the most obscure and unreadable perl one-liners to be a True Linux User is full of shit.
I've been using linux since 1997. It is an elitist community and always has been, but in my experience it'll tell you to RTFM if your question is answered in TFM, but it will give you good advice if it decides to give you advice at all. "Start out by learning to perl golf" isn't good advice.