Re: copying a file with .bak extension

[kennethk]

in reply to [SOLVED] copying a file with .bak extension

I assume this is the entire body of the script, and not just a snippet. I also assume you are running perl with the -i switch. If you simply modify that to be perl -i.bak ..., your issue will be solved. See perlrun.

If you have your -i switch in your hashbang, just modify it there instead.

Update: If all you are doing is appending "\n##Copyright (C) 2012 by firstName lastName\n" to the tail of the file, why are you using switches when you could just open the file for appending, and append? e.g.

use File::Copy;

for my $file (@ARGV) {
    -e $file or warn("File not found: $file\n"), next;
    
    copy($file, "$file.bak") or die "Copy failed ($file): $!";
    open my $fh, '>>', $file or die "Open failed ($file): $!";
    print $fh "\n##Copyright (C) 2012 by firstName lastName\n";
}

[jaffinito34]

I'm not that advanced, I just started playing with perl a couple weeks ago so I'm still learning how it works.

[kennethk]

I would argue that's exactly why you should adopt this approach. As a new user, you should avoid using classic Perl "magic", and make sure your code is straight-forward and readable. The script, as I've presented it, loops over the passed file names (@ARGV), tests to make sure you've passed file names that can be found (-e), copies the files using a CORE module (File::Copy) and then modifies the file with an append (perlopentut). It tests if operations succeed and is warnings and strict compliant. I never use command line switches in any of my code unless I'm writing one-liners, and half that time it would have been faster just to write a proper script.