Re^2: perl -i -pe ... with eof() testing

[Anonyrnous Monk]

in reply to Re: perl -i -pe ... with eof() testing
in thread perl -i -pe ... with eof() testing

This is what I figured, too (kind of). But why does it then "work" with the eof form?  This produces

--- cat before ---
line1
line2
line3
line1
line2
line3
--- script output to stdout ---
--- cat after ---
line1
line2
line3
opt=bar
line1
line2
line3
opt=bar

(I say "work" in quotes because it's not what is needed here, but what I would've expected.)

Also, perl -MO=Deparse ... doesn't highlight any difference, except the eof vs. eof() itself.

[ikegami]

The only way (eof) can check for per-file eof as documented would be if it read from the real file handle instead of the magical handle. The magical handle doesn't move to the next file because it's not used.

[Anonyrnous Monk]

Thanks, you're right.

Just for the record: I had confused myself unnecessarily by not putting a separator in between the cat of file1 and file2. Which made me wonder why the magical file handle is only being advanced by eof() at the very end, and not at every file boundary.  When you do it properly, however, i.e. something like

cat file1
echo ---
cat file2

the output is

...
--- perl output to stdout ---
line3
opt=bar
--- cat after ---
line1
line2
---
line3
line1
line2

which shows that line3 of the first file does in fact belong to file2 after the processing...

P.S. I've now settled on suggesting my collegue

perl -i -pe '$f||=s/opt=.*/opt=bar/; $_.="opt=bar\n" if !$f && !@ARGV 
+&& eof' files...

(but unfortunately it took a little too long to get working to leave an "it's easy with Perl" impression — that's my fault, however :)