John Degen wrote:
I'm using Perl 5.8.8 from ActiveState on Windows XP. I'm trying to accomplish a search and replace in a number of files in the same directory from the command line (cmd.exe). The problem is that the command perl -i -e "s/old/new/" * fails silently, i.e. no changes take place. My question is: does * indicate all files in the current directory (this did work in the Windows version of sed I tried)? I cannot find this in the docs or using Google. Or am I making another mistake?
Hi John Three problems here that I can see: - Perl won't do an in-place edit successfully on a Windows system. You have to specify a name for the old file to be renamed to. - It is the command shell on Unix systems that expands the wildcard into a list of filenames. On Windows your program sees just the single argument '*'. - You have written no code to process the arguments passed. You program is simply s/old/new/ which will just try to replace 'old' with 'new' in an uninitialised $_ variable (try perl -w -i -e "s/old/new/" * to see the evidence). I suggest you use something like perl -w -i.bak -p -e "s/old/new/" but I haven't tested this as you already have a directory set up ready to try it on :) HTH, Rob -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/
