Really, it is a binary data format, which can have the bytes 0x0A and 0x0D anywhere (not really functioning as newlines), but occasionally has embedded strings; I was trying to edit some of those occasional strings...

Something like that was my very first use of -pi back in the '90s - monkey-patching a different hostid into a binary bound to a specific Sun workstation, when due to sudden death of one machine they had to be transferred to the other which was not licensed. The only other method would have been manipulating the hostid at the OpenBoot PROM, which was deemed too dangerous (and it changes the MAC Address as well).

Then monkey-patching windows dlls containing incomplete translations (making sure that the replacing string is equal or lower in size as the original, of course)... that type of fun stuff.

Anyways. I am/was glad I could help ;-)

perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'

In reply to Re^3: binmode i/o for perl -pi in-place editing by shmem
in thread binmode i/o for perl -pi in-place editing by pryrt

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