Yeah, it does look like it's working. ++ for figuring it out :-)

That said, there is some cleanup that could be done. First thing is that you have a bunch of common logic, and it's repeated. If you've never heard the acronym "DRY", here it is: Don't Repeat Yourself. If we can move your saving of your twig to outside the blocks, it'd be an improvement. One way is to make your $twig a bit more global (increase scope), another is to create a sub for saving that can be called and passed the $twig either way. I've gone for the former.

Second is that when you save to a new file, you don't indent properly. There's nothing wrong with that - just be consistent. One way to do this is, again, descoping $twig somewhat.

Your $item_pasted flag is something I would take the other way: scope it. The easiest way to do this is with an anonymous sub instead of a named sub. (You can also do this with a state variable in perl 5.10, but you don't *really* want a state variable here, you really do want it scoped properly.)

Your file opening should use lexicals for a file handle, and you should try using the 3-arg version of open. Check for errors, and if you keep the scope down, you don't actually need to close the handle explicitly.

No need to quote a single variable. $file is the same thing as "$file" (except when you're using an overloaded object, and not even always then, but let's not worry about that here, we aren't using any).

So, what I end up with is:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XML::Twig;

my %links = (
             "img" => "/images/Blue_Test.jpg",
             "alt" => "Blue Test Image",
             "name" => "This is a test",
             "title" => "Hello World. This is a test page. Please clic
+k here for more information.",
             "url" => "http://localhost/this_is_a_test.htm",
             "dcr" => "/templatedata/test2123/test/this_is_a_test",
            );
my $path = "/this_is_a_test2.htm";
my $file = "s1.xml";

my $x = XML::Twig::Elt->new(
                            record => map {
                                XML::Twig::Elt->new( $_ => $links{$_})
                            }
                            sort keys %links)
    ->set_att("path",$path);

my $twig = XML::Twig->new(pretty_print => 'indented');
if(!-s $file) {
    $twig->set_root(
                    XML::Twig::Elt->new(data => $x)
                   );
} else {
    my $item_pasted;

    $twig->setTwigHandlers(
                           {
                               record => sub {
                                   my( $twig, $record)= @_;
                                   unless ($item_pasted) {
                                       my $rpath = $record->att('path'
+);
                                       if ($rpath eq $path) {
                                           $x->replace($record);
                                           $item_pasted=1;
                                           return
                                       }
                                   }
                               },
                           }
                          );

    $twig->parsefile($file);

    $x->paste('last_child',$twig->root) unless($item_pasted);

}

{
    open (my $xfile, ">", $file) or die "Can't save to $file: $!";
    $twig->print(\*$xfile);
}
[download]

Hope that helps!