•Re: Editing Files In Place

{
  local $^I = ".bak";
  local *ARGV;
  @ARGV = ".fetchmailrc";
  while (<>) {
    s/^(here)/$username\n$1/i;
    print;
  }
}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[belg4mit]

Oooh purdy. It'd always bugged me that one "had" to use -i. It's bit unfortunate you have to go the whole ARGV/STDIN route, but that's better than forking. thanks!

--
perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

[merlyn]

the whole ARGV/STDIN

Excuse me? There's no use of STDIN in that program. An empty diamond is the same as <ARGV>, not <STDIN>.

And beginning Perl hackers who confuse the two will eventually get burned. My rule is to never use <> (aka <ARGV>) if you ever print some kind of prompt, and I flunk any use to the contrary in code review. Work it out for yourself to see why. The proper use for interaction where you prompt and read input is <STDIN>.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[belg4mit]

Well yes, I new it was the ARGV filehandle, but I tend to think of waka waka as STDIN. If @ARGV is empty waka waka reads from STDIN.

(I'd even contemplated writing magic ARGV but decided against it ;-)

--
perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

[bunnyman]

I just tried this on perl 5.005_02 and I found that it would not work with local *ARGV but local @ARGV worked.

I assume localizing the ARGV filehandle somehow broke the <ARGV> magic. It works correctly on perl 5.6.0.