That error almost always has to do with unmatched quotation marks. Probably, the easiest way to figure out what’s wrong with it would be to turn your one-liner into a simple script. You’ll get waaaaaay too much information, but the answer will probably be in there.

If not, check test1.txt for any unmatched double quotes, single quotes, backticks, etc and that may lead you to the answer, as well.

Best wishes,

Mike

I execute this:

# perl -p -w -e ’s/(?:\n)(.*)//g’ test1.txt

And get this:

Bareword found where operator expected at -e line 1, near “s/(?:\n)(.*)</collectioninfo”
Unquoted string “collectioninfo” may clash with future reserved word at -e line 1.
syntax error at -e line 1, near “s/(?:\n)(.*)</collectioninfo”
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

Any help ?

Thx !!

For “not replacing” files that already exist, I use this with that perl one-liner when I’m piping filenames to it – it’s not built into the options, but is pretty simple to type once :)

perl -p -i -e ’s/ThisThing/ThatThing/; rename $_, unless -e $_;’

It doesn’t work “out of context” because $_ requires a value, but you can use the rename half of my version of the one-liner to insert in the previous code to prevent against overwriting :)

Great post :)

, Mike

# perl -v

This is perl, v5.6.1 built for sun4-solaris-64int
(with 48 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

# find /usr/local/tmp/aaa -name “*.zip” -exec perl -p -i -e ’s/zip/ZIP/g’ {} \;

# ls -l /usr/local/tmp/aaa
total 6
-rw-r–r– 1 carlos staff 49 Feb 22 09:35 9_Recommended.zip
-rw-r–r– 1 carlos staff 49 Feb 22 09:35 DLG_V11_2.zip
-rw-r–r– 1 carlos staff 49 Feb 22 09:35 tzupdater-1_0_1.zip
#

Single quotes doesn’t work too

# find /usr/local/tmp/aaa -name ‘*.zip’ -exec perl -p -i -e ’s/zip/ZIP/g’ {} \;
# ls -l /usr/local/tmp/aaa
total 6
-rw-r–r– 1 carlos staff 49 Feb 22 09:37 9_Recommended.zip
-rw-r–r– 1 carlos staff 49 Feb 22 09:37 DLG_V11_2.zip
-rw-r–r– 1 carlos staff 49 Feb 22 09:37 tzupdater-1_0_1.zip

Not selecting the files that will be changed is a problem: Files that do not match will change (ie time, inode). Not good for keeping timestamps of unchanged files (think for example source files: make will rebuild the objects!)

/me is wondering if perl has an option “do not replace the file by a new one if it did not change, just keep it”.

Here’s one of my favorite Perl-based one-liners which I whip out when I need to find a bunch of files and replace text based on regular expressions at the command line.
find . -iname ‘*.js’ -exec perl -pi.bak -e ’s/2006/2007/g&#8217…