I may be missing some additional context but editing the file in-place seems to be an overly complicated way of adding a new username. Your code and comments suggest that what is really required is to append to the file.

In which case you could do something like the following (see also perlopentut):

open(FETCHMAILRC, '>> .fetchmailrc') or die "Unable to open FMRC." +; print FETCHMAILRC $username, "\n";

If you really need to edit the file in-place then you can use the -i command line option or $^I, as demonstrated so elegantly by merlyn.

--
John.


In reply to Re: Editing Files In Place by jmcnamara
in thread Editing Files In Place by gnubbs

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.