Up-front diclaimer: I think I understand what you are trying to do here, but I am not sure. If I understand correctly you are trying to take a list of files and replace To: "<What ever is here> with To: <another address>." If not then my reply is going to not make sense.

I see two ways of doing this and regexes are not my greatest strength but here goes. A one liner:

$ perl -spi -e 's/^To:\s+[\.\@\D\,]*/To: email.com/' FILE
[download]

NOTE: I am suspicious of the regex that I glombed from your original post. I used it "as-is" figuring you might have a reason for using it. I might have been tempted to use something much more generic.

Next I look at your code and see a couple of problems, besides the regex. When you are opening files you have:

open (INFILE, "<$dirContent");# this is ok... but...
open (OUTFILE, "<$dirContent"); # this is fishy.
[download]

You have opened OUTFILE for reading not for writing. Also, is $dirContent a single filename or a list of file names?

Secondly, in your first code sniglet I am curious why you are use'ing <cpan:://File::Copy> and then not doing anything with it?

Just a few first pass thoughts...

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Peter @ Berghold . Net

Sieze the cow! Bite the day!

Test the code? We don't need to test no stinkin' code! All code posted here is as is where is unless otherwise stated.

Brewer of Belgian style Ales