Dear Anonymous Monk(s)

Of course, sorry I forgot to post the most recent version of the code.

use 5.014;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Path::Tiny qw/ path /;
use POSIX();
use autodie qw/ close /;
use File::BOM;
use Carp::Always; 
use Data::Dump qw/ dd /;
use Win32;
use Win32::Unicode qw/ statW /;

Main( @ARGV );
exit( 0 );

sub Main {

    #my( $infile_paths ) = @_;
    my( $infile_paths ) = 'C:\dev\test_paths.txt';;
    my @paths = GetPaths( $infile_paths );
    #print "The following paths were in the file:\n";
    #say for @paths;
    for my $path ( @paths ){
        RetrieveAndBackupXML( $path );
    }
    #return @paths;
} 

## end sub Main

sub GetPaths  {
      use File::BOM;
##    my @paths = path( shift )->lines_utf8;
    my @paths = path( shift )->lines( { binmode => ":via(File::BOM)" }
+ );
    s/\s+$// for @paths; # "chomp"
    return @paths;
} 

## end sub GetPaths 

sub RetrieveAndBackupXML {
#~     my( $directory ) = @_; ## same as shift @_ ##  same as shift
    my $directory = shift;
    my $date      = POSIX::strftime( '%Y-%m-%d', localtime ); #sets cu
+rrent date and time to be added to backup file
    my $bak       = "$date.bak"; #date added to the .bak file
    my @xml_files = path( $directory )->children( qr/\.xml$/ );
    for my $file ( @xml_files ) {
        Replace( $file, "$file-$bak" ); #sub Replace using it's 2 para
+meters as defined below
    }
} 

## end sub Main

sub Replace {
    my( $in, $bak ) = shift;
    
    path( $in )->move( $bak ); #Creates a copy of the original file
    
    my $infh  = path( $bak )->openr_raw;
    my $outfh = path( $in )->openrw_raw;
    
    while( <$infh> ) {
        #s{&}{&amp;}g; ## will match more than what you want fix it
        s{&amp;amp;}{&amp;}g;
        s{\s>\s}{&gt;}g;
        s{\s<\s}{&lt;}g;
        print $outfh $_;
    }
    
    close $infh;
    close $outfh;
}

 ## end sub Replace
[download]

In case you spot an errors in terms of comments, please do comment on the comment(s) in the code, the more feedback the better, since I might be using that code a lot and might also have to explain to colleagues.

Thanks a mil for your help

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