nullprogram.com/blog/2009/05/20/
At work right now I am using two different machines. One is a 32-bit
SPARC and the other is a very powerful SMP x86-64. Sometimes data are
generated on one machine and used in a simulation on the other. There
is a problem of byte-order, though. The SPARC is big-endian and the
other is little-endian, and the programs on both sides don't pay
attention to that small detail.
Luckily, the data are all 4-byte aligned. That's perfect for a Perl
one-liner byte order conversion,
perl -e 'print scalar reverse while read STDIN, $_, 4' < in.le > out.be
Perl is really great for concise hacks. I really like how this
one-liner almost reads like a natural language sentence. Is there any
other language that can do powerful one-liners like Perl?