You are right! And your solution is indeed much more elegant: I like it! I didn't know that the .. operator could be used in a scalar context in this way: now I've read again the perlop manpage and I understand the .. flip-flop like behavior :-) Thank you very much for your suggestion. Anyway I still need the -i switch to have the files edited in-place, and I still need the File::Find stuff to traverse the whole directory tree.