Generally is a bad idea to do an inplace edit without backup. For this reason Perl -i commandline switch always ask for a backup file extension.

Yes! This has long been a pet peeve of mine (as indicated in Re-runnably editing a file in place and Perl Best Practices book: is this one a best practice or a dodgy practice?).

BTW, I was delighted to see the most excellent File::Replace by haukex appear on the CPAN (which I see he used in his reply to the root node).