This was a little chunk of code that I pulled together so that I could quickly view the textual contents of a Word Document. This can be used as a command line tool and does the trick fairly well, in my opinion. Of course, you will lose a lot of contextual information, so take it with a grain of salt. The code is provided below:

#!/usr/bin/perl  use Text::Wrap;  $Text::Wrap::columns = 80; my $file = join( '', <> );  $file =~ s/<[^>]*>//g; $file =~ s/\r//g; $file =~ s/[\t ]+/ /g; $file =~ s/\ //g;  print wrap( '', '', $file );