Why don't you just show us your code instead of describing what you did to convert the code shown to the code you claim to use?

I assume from your description that your code looks like the following:

`sed 's/^ \{2,\}//' -i filename.html`;

[download]

This is bad of course, as you don't check for the system result, for error messages or for filename.html being in the current directory. But your current problem seems to lie elsewhere because you describe that your sed invocation works properly as long as the regexp is simple. I don't believe you that the inclusion of ^ was the only thing - you are falling into the trap that backticks act like double quotes and all your backslashes get interpreted in the first round of backslash interpretation by Perl and never get seen by sed. Hence one solution could be to double all your backslashes to make sure that sed sees them.

A saner solution would be to use system instead of backticks:

system('sed','s/^ \{2,\}//', '-i', 'filename.html') == 0
    or die "Couldn't launch sed: $! / $?";

[download]

Even saner would be to remove the need for sed alltogether, and it isn't that long either:

use Tie::File;
my $filename = 'filename.html';

tie @file, 'Tie::File', $filename 
    or die "Couldn't open '$filename': $!";
for (@file) {
    s/^ {2}//;
};

[download]

Especially if you'll be processing thousands of files, an all-Perl solution will be faster than launching a separate instance of sed for every file.

In reply to Re: sed regexp works on the command line, but not from Perl script by Corion
in thread sed regexp works on the command line, but not from Perl script by Anonymous Monk

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