As a tool to produce the list of commands with descriptions, a pure Perl solution is obviously better. And that's probably how I would have done it had I started out to produce such a tool. But this complicated pipeline of commands started off life in a discussion about getting a list of commands in your PATH (with no descriptions) and grew from there.

I thought it was valuable pedagogically to leave it as a pipeline since that way readers can experiment (in the way I mentioned at the end of the article) to see what results with different commands.
This sort of experimentation would be less likely had I just presented a Perl script.

I think for many readers, the idea of a pipeline of commands and the explanations of the pipeline stages may be more valuable than the end tool.

I know this is 'old' news, but thanks for the script and BRILLIANT explanation of each step. I am revising for an exam which will require us to write pipelines, and this was most helpful!