It might puzzle you as a rather weird goal, but I would like to ask you nevertheless, because it would be extremely helpful to be able to do this :-)

Typically, a search and replace operation $_ =~ s/foo/bar/g; will be executed globally for the input file. Sometimes, you would like to decide for each individual match of the search string whether to replace it or not. This is what I mean by selective replace.

The script should have a loop that for each matching string

• locates the individual match of the search phrase in the input file,
• displays it in its context - let's say 5 words before and 5 words after each match,
• takes user input - maybe simply 'Y' (yes) or 'N' (no) and
• depending on the input value, either replaces the matching string, if the input == 'Y' or otherwise doesn't replace it,

Would you think that this is feasible? And if yes, how could that be done? How would you interrupt processing, display stuff and take user input from the command line and finally continue processing?

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