The -p option causes printing to occur via an assumed continue block. continue blocks execute even if you short circuit the assumed loop with next, so it becomes somewhat of a contortion skipping the first line while using the -p option. One way to do it (using the -p option) would be to read the first line in a BEGIN{} block and do nothing with it, but that's silly because there's a better solution. If you really don't want to print one (or maybe several) of the lines, retake control over print by using the -n option instead of -p. 

perl -ni.bak -e "print if $line++;"

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The preceeding snippet does an inline edit where the first line is not echoed back out to the output file again, but all subsequent lines are.


Dave

In reply to Re: deleting first line of a file using in-place editing by davido
in thread deleting first line of a file using in-place editing by ranjan_jajodia

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