I should mention that this works for 10.4. I haven't upgraded yet, just about backed up and ready to go. So the 10.5 dictionary may be in a different place and may be a different format.

The command switches are documented in "man perlrun".

-n makes perl read the input file in a while loop until the file is read completely.

-e indicates the next argument is a script.

The regex looks for a pattern like

<o:ent ..."...."..."..."...."> 

which indicates an entry in the dictionary. The actual entry word is between the last 2 double quotes which is caught by the brackets and referenced by the $1 in the while loop. The /g modifier at the end of the regex allows the while loop to loop through the file. The $a is needed to retain the "word" through another regex. The backslash-b's makes the regex the equivalent of -w.

Is that clear? Perl is a strange language.

[ Reply to This | # ]

The dictionary indeed has a slightly different name in 10.5 but I corrected that already.
I had checked 'man perl' not 'man perlrun', thanks for pointing me to that.

Perl is still ok, regular expressions are what often throws me off.

[ Reply to This | # ]