The quotes are not the problem. Windows is. The example was meant as an excercise to the reader, but that doesn't seem to work :(

will solve this specific issue, but it won't fix the way he thinks

The quotes are not the problem.

Are you sure?   (It might not be the only problem, but I think at least one...)

I don't have a Windows box here to try, but IIRC, ' is not treated as a special character by the Windows shell, so it just passes on the single quotes as is. IOW, the Perl program would get the string constant 's{Text::CSV}{Text::CSV_XS}g' as the code to run (instead of the substitution command without the quotes) — which is why it rightly complains "Useless use of a constant in void context".  You'd get the same error on Unix if you had typed (of course, this doesn't work on Windows either... just to illustrate what's happening):

$ perl -pi -we"'s{Text::CSV}{Text::CSV_XS}g'" *.pl
Useless use of a constant in void context at -e line 1.
[download]

OK, not entirely correct, but to fix the problem of the error message, i- needs something more on windows:

C:\Tmp>perl -pi -we's{Text::CSV}{Text::CSV_XS}g' xx.pm
Useless use of a constant in void context at -e line 1.
Can't do inplace edit without backup.

C:\Tmp>perl -pi -we"s{Text::CSV}{Text::CSV_XS}g" xx.pm
Can't do inplace edit without backup.

C:\Tmp>perl -pi.bak -we's{Text::CSV}{Text::CSV_XS}g' xx.pm
Useless use of a constant in void context at -e line 1.

C:\Tmp>perl -pi.bak -we"s{Text::CSV}{Text::CSV_XS}g" xx.pm

C:\Tmp>
[download]

But I'm sure perl -e"'...'" will not work anywhere.


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn