I'm not sure if I should post this since it isn't a reply to the OP Question but it might be intresting (or not)...

When I write a one-liner, which should run on multiple platforms or when I'm unsure of the platform (for example when posting it somewhere), then I never use ' or " in the code.

Instead of using them I use qq and q, and I use the hex-values (\x22 for ", and \x27 for '). The advantage of this is that someone should only need to change the outer symbols.

This turns your one-liner into:

perl -i.bak -pe 's/^\x22\d+\x22/++$i; qq{\x22$i\x22}/e;' file
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