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I have some code that makes changes to the contents of a file and writes the changes to a temporary file. I then have to rename the temporary file back to the original file.
Is there a way to do this without ever needing to create a temporary file?
When you run Perl with the -i
flag it allows you to edit files in place,
(and optionally to create a backup file).
For example:
perl -pi -e 's/abc/XYZ/g' file.txt
will overwrite the original file.txt
file with the edited file, and
substitute all occurences of the string abc
with the string XYZ
.
If you provide an argument for the -i
flag, this will allow you to edit
files in place, and make a backup file at the same time.
For example:
perl -pi'.orig' -e 's/abc/XYZ/g' file.txt
will make changes to file.txt
and save the original file in file.txt.orig
See perldoc perlrun
for more info.