But, that star there doesn't do anything. That would create files named "foo*.bak" and "bar*.bak" from "foo" and "bar". And thus, the rename would undo it just fine.

Unless you're talking about some local hack to your Perl to make it interpret $^I differently.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

update Oh my goodness. A new feature was snuck in to Perl in 5.6, and documented in perlrun but not perlvar.

My apologies. Wow, I'll have to write a column about it now to remember it. {grin} And I don't recall it in the perldelta from 5.5 to 5.6, or perhaps I considered it un-noteworthy. Yeah, just checked, not in perldelta. No wonder I hadn't noticed it.

update 2 On further research, 5.4 didn't have the feature, but 5.5 did. And yet it wasn't in 5.5's perldelta. That's why I missed it. I don't always diff the entire manpage set. {sigh} I rely on perldelta.

update 3 See "Put your inplace-edit backup files into a subdir".

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