That scrmable thing has really been making the rounds: I've seen the text translated into three or four other (human) languages now, not to mention all the people writing their own scripts in their marginalized geek-language du jour.

But my script was malfunctioning for a bunch of people, and I finally figured out why. Fucking Unicode again. If $LANG contains "utf8" (which is the default on recent Red Hat systems), then "^\w" doesn't work right, among other things. Check this out:

setenv LANG en_US
echo -n "foo.bar" | \
perl -e '$_ = <>; print join (" | ", split (/([^\w]+)/)) . "\n";'

      ===> "foo | . | bar" (right)

setenv LANG en_US.utf8
echo -n "foo.bar" | \
perl -e '$_ = <>; print join (" | ", split (/([^\w]+)/)) . "\n";'

      ===> "foo.bar" (wrong!)

It works fine in both cases if you do $_ = "foo.bar" instead of reading it from stdin.

perl-5.8.0-88, Red Hat 9. Hate.