Hi markkawika,

The first thing that comes to mind if you want to do it with regexes is to first capture the quoted part, and then change it:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $line = qq[file="path/goes/here"];

print "Line is '$line'\n";

if ($line =~ /^([^"]*)"([^"]*)"(.*)$/) {
    my ($prefix, $quoted, $suffix) = ($1, $2, $3);
    $quoted =~ s|[^/]|x|g;
    $line = qq[$prefix"$quoted"$suffix];
}

print "Line is '$line'\n";
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Another way, if you're sure that the expression ends with the quoted expression, would be something very simple like:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $line = qq[file="path/goes/here"];

print "Line is '$line'\n";

my @sections = split('"', $line);
$sections[1] =~ s|[^/]|x|g;
$line = join('"', @sections) . '"';

print "Line is '$line'\n";
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Both result in:

Line is 'file="path/goes/here"'
Line is 'file="xxxx/xxxx/xxxx"'
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Both are less simple than your solution, of course, but keep things within Perl, without resorting to using the shell.