Put your inplace-edit backup files into a subdir

I just discovered that the inplace-edit value can now include an asterisk to mean "old file". This means you can now do cool tricks like put your "old" versions of the file into a subdirectory with the original name, not a modified name! Here's a one-liner that puts all the old files into a directory named for the unix epoch timestamp (a 10-digit integer increasing by one per second).

perl -pe 'BEGIN { mkdir $^T; $^I = "$^T/*" } s/foo/bar/g' file1 file2 
+file3 ...
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•Re: Put your inplace-edit backup files into a subdir by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 21, 2003 at 06:08 UTC
I've had more than one person write to me in the day since I posted this snippet to say "Randal, you forgot the `-i`! It's not an in-place edit without that!". No, I didn't. Setting `$^I` is the programmatic equivalent to setting `-i` on the command-line. Cool, eh? -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]
Re^2: Put your inplace-edit backup files into a subdir by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Apr 21, 2003 at 12:05 UTC
I was personally puzzled at what `$^T` is for a moment, though I knew about `$^I`. So the simple form would be `mkdir bak/ ; perl -pi'bak/' -e 's/foo/bar/g' file1 file2 file3 ...` [download] Or `perl -pi'bak/' -e 'BEGIN { mkdir($^I =~ m!(./)!) } s/foo/bar/g' file +1 file2 file3 ...` [download] Or maybe even `perl -MFile::Path -pi'bak/' -e 'BEGIN { mkpath [ $^I =~ m!(./)! ] } +s/foo/bar/g' file1 file2 file3 ...` [download] grin* Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply] [d/l] [select]