Desiccation describes the Process of becoming an adult, in the worst sense of the word. The primary script (in grey) is written in Perl, which is a high-level scripting language. The beauty of scripting languages is how little setup is required. (Note how there is no Full Code tab for this Process.) The rest of the "code" shown is taken from a session of using the Unix operating system.

life% is a Unix prompt; life is probably the server name, but might also be the current user or directory. The Unix command more prints the contents of a file to the screen. Here, we are looking at the contents of the growup file, which is a Perl script.

This script continues to read in each line of input, and performs a number of search-and-replace operations on the incoming text, as directed by all the s///; lines. The g at the end of each of these lines stands for global, which means Perl will replace all instances and not only the first. A ? means the preceding letter is optional. (In practice, "regular expressions" like these tend to be a bit more complex and versatile.) Finally, the script prints out the changed lines. This sort of script is often called a filter.

After viewing the contents of this file, we direct the contents of the file dreams through the growup filter, and dump the output into a file called responsibilities. We then remove (delete) the original dreams file.

As an example of how this works, if our original dreams file contained this:

I want to spend my time playing.
When summer comes, I will lie half-asleep,
and imagine a future of possibilities.

our responsibilities file would contain this:

I have to spend my time working.
When retirement comes, I will lie half-asleep,
and remember a past of possibilities.