I am cleaning up a bunch of data and am putting together a series of perl commands to do the job.

The data to work on looks something like this:

fjfjf fjfjf fjfjf <?Pub fontsize="10.00pt"?> ghg gghg
fgf gf
gjgjg gjgjg gjgjg <?Pub fontsize="9.00pt"?> gggg
dfd dfdf dfd <?Pub fontsize=
"19.00pt"?> fgf fgfg gfff
fgf
fggf ghg ghgghhg ghghg

[download]

I need to simply remove the '<?Pub XXXX ?>' strings.

I am using a command like this:

find ./MMData -iname '*.dita*' -print|xargs perl -pi -e 's/<\?Pub fontsize\="0.50pt"\?\>/<\!\-\-Rem Pub Dir\-\-\>/g';

I've tried wildcard'ing the search string but cannot get it to work - I always seem to end up greedily taking up a lot of the rest of the file

Also - I cannot get my search to find these "search strings" that are split over a line - I guess if I can get the wildcard working I could put a linefeed in there ?

Also - now that I'm asking (!!!), how do I make this command NOT produce a BAK file ?

In reply to search and replace question by Anonymous Monk

Title:
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