If I understand correctly, you can probably achieve your desired output by removing the \b elements in your substitution. \b only matches at a word boundary, and it sounds like you don't want that.

Also, a couple notes on your code... $_ is aliased to each element of your array when using map or a for loop, so there's no need to do something like @lines = map { s/...//; $_ } @lines; ... You can just say s/...// for @lines;

If you're reading and writing to the same file, you can use the -i option on the command line. So you could probably shorten your entire code to this:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/apple/orange/gi' c:\data
[download]

This will overwrite your original file, substituting 'apple' with 'orange' wherever it is found, and will make a backup copy with a .bak extension in case that's not what you wanted.

-- Mike

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just,my${.02}