It took me a while to find it, but "man perlrun" will tell you how to slurp the whole file in one go (-0777)

The /s switch on the search+replace will treat the whole file as one string - ignoring line breaks.

The following will work on most Perl module README files 

perl -0777 -nple 's/(SUPPORT.+AND)/$1 PATCHY/s' README

[download]

Be careful with greedy matching - that .+ should be .+? if you want the output to be "SUPPORT AND PATCHY DOCUMENTATION". In your case it will match greedily until the last </Directory> unless you add the '?'.

In reply to Re: perl one liner to search for a string, then search for a different string and append a new line by uncoolbob
in thread perl one liner to search for a string, then search for a different string and append a new line by BradV

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