This is something I wrote over at DocForge, but I'm keeping it here for posterity. You never know what those crazy wiki-ers might do with it over there ;-)

I've got a directory full of eBooks in the godawful Microsoft .lit format. I had marked with the Finder labels the ones I've already read, and wanted to convert all the ones I hadn't read yet into a readable format.

After using the Spotlight UNIX tools and applying liberal amounts of command-line trickery, the end result was a rather beautiful pipeline, if I do say so myself.