hello,
this maybe silly to ask, worse if asked by a level 5 monk who needs only 75 points up to level 6, but I cannot solve my problem, so...
here's the plain question:
I often use a keylogger, please don't ask why, how and where, but what really matters is that its log looks similar to this:
------cuthere------------
hee{BS}llo, I'll be bnack{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}ack next saturday.
{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}{BS}www.yahoo.com
"keyloggers" + "linux"
{BS}{BS}{BS}
-----cuthere---------------

and so on.
I wanted to write a perlscript to get rid of all those {BS} and substitute them with real backspaces, so that I could see what was REALLY written.
so I tried this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $output;
$output = $ARGV[0].".clean";
open (INF, "< $ARGV[0]");
open (OUF, "> $output");
while (<INF>)
    {    
    s/{BS}/\b/g;
    }
print OUF $riga;
close (INF);
close (OUF);

[download]
but it fills the log with 0x08 characters instead of backspacing over the previous character. useless.
so I thought of this regexp:

s/.{BS}//g

but it didn't work and I couldn't figure out why.
then I did: after having found the first occurrence of .{BS} it deletes it and falls on the following "{" starting to search again, and finds the next one this way:

 {BS}{BS}
 |
 -------   this is current position

 {BS}{BS}
     ----  this is what it finds!

 {BS}{BS}
    -----  and this is what it deletes, leaving me with a

 {BS{BS

[download]

and so on.

the real question is:
how can i tell to perl that it must start searching each time FROM THE BEGINNING and not from the last position, so to be sure that each backspace is converted into a REAL backspace?
thanks, SiG

In reply to Cleaning the Log by Sigmund

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