Thank you ikegami for the constructive criticism regarding my post and the heads up about -i in windows, and thank you toolic for the solution you found that works great! I appreciate your time and efforts.

"Its not how hard you work, its how much you get done."

Windows does not work with the equivalent command line:

Technically, it's a question of which shell you are using.

What am I missing

Hard to tell, you didn't show what's giving the error.

I am using ActiveState Perl 5.10 on Windows Vista in a command window initiated by cmd.exe.
The error is produced by the Perl one-liner:

perl -p -i -e "s/old/new/" *.txt

"Its not how hard you work, its how much you get done."

There's no syntax error in that. You said you tried stuff that gave you "The syntax of the command is incorrect."

By the way, -i with no extension doesn't work in Windows.

I hacked up File::DosGlob to suit me a while back. I vaguely recall some problem with globs that didn't match anything, and whether they were silently dropped, or passed through as a glob. Either or both of these may cause needless errors or incomplete data, so I added options and checking for the caller to control this behavior, and was rather paranoid about accepting options that weren't recognized.

I should go back and clean this up nice with POD, etc., but I'm lazy.

I also had unsophisticated users running my scripts, and sometimes running them on *nix. They would not need this module, and wouldn't have installed it, but of course it couldn't just be used, so I used this code instead:

# This BEGIN block avoids including File::DosGlob::Param for non-windo
+ws systems
BEGIN
{
    if ( $^O =~ /win/i )
    {
        require File::DosGlob::Param;
        import  File::DosGlob::Param qw( dosglob );
    }
}
[download]

Now, this didn't avoid the issue of the user not having it installed on Windows, but at least it didn't blow up unnecessarily in *nix.

And finally, an example invocation:

# convert filename wildcards to actual filenames
if ( $^O =~ /win/i ) # only if DOS
{
    if ( exists( $INC{'File/DosGlob/Param.pm'} ) ) # only if loaded
    {
        dosglob( "Array_Ref" => \@ARGV, 
                 "Remove_Empty_Matches" => 1,
                 "Warn_On_Empty_Matches" => 1 );
    }
    END
    {
        if ( ( $^O =~ /win/i )
         and not exists( $INC{'File/DosGlob/Param.pm'} ) )
        {
            warn "Consider installing module File::DosGlob::Param...\n
+";
        }
    }
}
[download]