Is there a reason, why not to make python useful for practical one liners to replace perl and awk? There is page Powerful Python One-Liners, https://wiki.python.org/moin/Powerful%20Python%20One-Liners. But almost none of them handles files, behaves like unix filter or is ugly – must import modules, etc. It seems that the command line options like -a, -n, -p, -F are still free. :-) https://docs.python.org/3/using/cmdline.html Why not use them almost the same way as in Perl? https://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun#-n https://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun#-p https://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun#-a https://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun#-Fpattern E.g. -n would be almost equivalent to import sys,os,re from fileinput import * for line in input(): <-c code comes here> close() -p will print(line) as last command of the for cycle. Why to learn Perl/awk/datamash/mlr/…, for “one line like” tasks? Thank you in advance Hans PS: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/the-top-10-tricks-of-perl-one-liners-v2 https://gist.github.com/joyrexus/7328094 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1589994/how-do-i-write-a-unix-filter-in-... Why not to have an elegant (one line) answer in python for questions like this? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40708370/drop-duplicates-and-keep-first-...