Is there a Perl substitute for the cut and paste shell commands?

Question

I saw once a quick and dirty Perl implementation for the cut and paste linux commands. It was something like perl 'print "$F1"' filename to substitute a cut -f1 filename command

Can someone tell me how was this Perl way? Specifically, I'm interested because this, unlike cut/paste, will work the same also in Windows environments.

Answer 1

cut

perl -alpe'$_=$F[0]'
perl -alpe'$_="@F[1..3]"'

To give a custom input separator,

perl -F: -alpe'$_=$F[0]'

To change the output separator,

perl -F: -alpe'$"=":";$_="@F[1..3]"'

To grep while you're at it,

perl -alne'print$F[0]if/blah/'

paste

Not quite as easy.

#!/usr/bin/perl
for (@ARGV ? @ARGV : qw(-)) {
    if ($_ eq '-') {push @files, *STDIN}
    else {open $files[@files], '<', $_}
}
while (grep defined, (@lines = map scalar <$_>, @files)) {
    chomp @lines;
    print join("\t", @lines), "\n";
}