I assume this is the entire body of the script, and not just a snippet. I also assume you are running perl with the -i switch. If you simply modify that to be perl -i.bak ..., your issue will be solved. See perlrun.

If you have your -i switch in your hashbang, just modify it there instead.

Update: If all you are doing is appending "\n##Copyright (C) 2012 by firstName lastName\n" to the tail of the file, why are you using switches when you could just open the file for appending, and append? e.g. 

use File::Copy;

for my $file (@ARGV) {
    -e $file or warn("File not found: $file\n"), next;
    
    copy($file, "$file.bak") or die "Copy failed ($file): $!";
    open my $fh, '>>', $file or die "Open failed ($file): $!";
    print $fh "\n##Copyright (C) 2012 by firstName lastName\n";
}

[download]

#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

In reply to Re: copying a file with .bak extension by kennethk
in thread [SOLVED] copying a file with .bak extension by jaffinito34

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.