From: "Ron Jeffries" <ronjeffries / acm.org>
>
>   this chunk of code takes some 15 seconds, which I
> sort of zeroed in on by successive refinement. I have no idea what it
> even means. If someone would care to translate it, I'd be interested
> and grateful.
> 
>    `#{ruby} -i.bak -pe 'sub(/^[0-9]+$/){$&.to_i * 5}' script_tmp`

Appears to be shelling out to another ruby process which will take
all the lines in a script_tmp file beginning with a number, and
multiply those numbers * 5.  The original file will be renamed
script_tmp.bak and the modifiled file will be saved as script_tmp.

(Unless script_tmp is a directory?  I've only ever done -i with
files.)

Normally a command like that wouldn't take long, unless there's
an awful lot of data to process.


Regards,

Bill