On Wed, 2004-04-07 at 13:21, Bob Showalter wrote: > Weaver, Walt wrote: > > Okay, so I do a "perl -pi -e 's/$/;/g' <filename>" to try and append a > > semicolon to the end of each record in a file in Linux. > > > > It does that just fine. Unfortunately it also prepends a semicolon > > onto the beginning of each record too. > > Well, not exactly. Note that there's no semicolon in front of the first > line. > > You need to leave the "g" off. When you use /g, you're saying to repeat the > substitution multiple times for each line. You only want one match for each > line. > > What's happening is that perl lets $ match at the end of the line, or just > before a trailing newline character. When you use /g, it ends up matching > twice: once before the trailing newline and once at the very end of the > string. > > So if the first line in the file is "foo", you wind up with: > > foo;\n <-- first replacement > foo;\n; <-- second replacement > > The second semicolon will display at the front of the next line. > > Note that you can also achieve this by using the -l (ell) option. In this > case perl strips the line terminator off before doing the substition and > adds it back on before printing the line. Then /g can only find one match. > > But the problem is /g; just leave it off. > Thanks for the info. It's much appreciated!
--Walt -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
