[shadowphex]

The perl here is not really that crazy to remember.

-a autosplits each line by whitespace and puts each element into the array F (this was inspired by AWK).

-n loops through each line of the file, and -E executes the perl.

$. (NR in AWK) is the line number.

As others have noted, you can write the same thing in ruby on the command line already with `ruby -ane 'puts $F[1] if $.>1'`

(Notice the similarities?)

If you write one liners in AWK, Perl, or Ruby often the "odd" variables look more like useful shortcuts.

*edit You could also write the perl without any of the special variables, but it would be much more verbose, hence the special characters and flags.