I presented this challenge at work as a beat-the-winter-blahs activity. But then I felt I couldn't present a merely operative solution. As the local Perl geek, I felt required to demonstrate that Perl could do clean, well written solutions, not just line noise. I wanted a balance between advanced Perl features and easy comprehension. On the Unix command line, I prefer piping commands together, rather than using a bunch of intermediate files. Similarly in Perl I advocate using map{} and grep{}, and feeding the output of one function into the input of another. I consider those standard idioms any programmer needs to learn. On the other hand, there were a couple of situations where exceptions and oddities in the code made me uncomfortable. Pulling things into subroutines such as calc_field_width() simplified things and made the code clearer, I think. I guess the lesson of that is that short subroutines are better. I knew that! I'm open to suggestions for alternative ways of...