perl -i.orig -pe 's/OLD/NEW/e' does not work

[hot1]

Hi,
I am trying to switch all occurences of the word "OLD" to "NEW" using either of the following simple commands, but my FILE.TXT does not change. What am I doing wrong? Neither of these commands seem to work. They do create a FILE.TXT.orig though.

>perl -i.orig -pe 's/OLD/NEW/e' FILE.TXT
>perl -i.orig -pe 's{\bOLD\b}{NEW}' FILE.TXT

Thanks.
David

 

[chazoid]

try like this:

perl -pi.orig -e 's/OLD/NEW/g' FILE.TXT

 

[hot1]

Nope, did not work. Thanks for your help though. Happy New Year to you all and may you grow very rich <smile>.
I got this line from Perl Cookbook. Here's what the CookBook says:
========================
% perl -pi.orig -e 's/DATE/localtime/e'
will be executed as:

while (<>) {
if ($ARGV ne $oldargv) { # are we at the next file?
rename($ARGV, $ARGV . '.orig');
open(ARGVOUT, ">$ARGV"); # plus error check
select(ARGVOUT);
$oldargv = $ARGV;
}
s/DATE/localtime/e;
}
continue{
print;
}
select (STDOUT); # restore default output
========================

Here are the contents of my file.txt:
0
1
1
645
868773201911.000000
0.000000
dho
1103845281
275
10
'OLD''Time Periods''Currencies'
11
Hello, test

 

[icrf]

works fine here, too. If you're in windows, remember you need to use "" instead of '' around your CLI one-liners.

c:\> perl -pi.orig -e "s/OLD/NEW/g" FILE.TXT

________________________________________
Andrew

I work for a gift card company!

 

[mikevh]

Works for me (ActiveState Perl v5.8.0 on Win XP Pro).

Note that you definitely don't need the /e modifier in this case. /e means "eval right hand side of re as Perl code." It's needed in the example from PCB because localtime is the name of a builtin Perl function and is hence code. The string "NEW" is not code, so no /e needed.

 

[hot1]

Ahh!!! I had to use double quotes!! Thanks kind sirs!!