You can achieve within a program the same effect as with the -i command line switch, by setting the perlvar $^I to the value of the backup extension. For example, the following snippet upper-cases the contents of the files foo.txt and bar.txt in place, and puts backup copies in foo.txt.bkp and bar.txt.bkp (note that there is no explicit open):

use strict;
use warnings;

$^I = q(.bkp);
@ARGV = qw( foo.txt bar.txt );
print uc while <>;

__END__
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Thank you. That was what I was looking for.

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Food for thought, not fuel for flames.

Like this?

perl -pi.bak -e "s/ /_/;" infile.txt
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See perlrun. For an on-site reference, see Re: One Liners (warning, I wrote that node).

Updated: fixed '-e'

Surprisingly I also had exactly the same deja vu type experience a couple of days ago. And as quoted above, the -p command loops through text executing the command you give, and printing the result. The -i specifies what extension you want to give to your backup files.

My most recent attempt was a file that looked like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -i.orig -p

s/submit_(.*?)_/submit\u$1/g;
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I love the way you can specify command line arguments on the hash-bang line. The code above used the in-place capitalisation regexp operator discussed in another recent node (Regexp matched part to lower case).

Nope, it was a few lines of code. Although I seem to remember seeing that described in the same context.

---

Food for thought, not fuel for flames.

Hi,

You might of seen it in FMTYEWTK About Mass Edits In Perl or perlrun

HTH.

Walking the road to enlightenment... I found a penguin and a camel on the way.....
Fancy a yourname@perl.me.uk? Just ask!!!

Are you looking for the -i option?

From perldoc perlrun: