

Have you ever wanted to use perl -pi inside perl? Did you have the guts

to localize $^I and @ARGV to do that? Now you can do that with a simple

call to edit_file or edit_file_lines in the new .018 release of

File::Slurp. Now you can modify a file in place with a simple call.

edit_file reads a whole file into $_, calls its code block argument and

writes $_ back out the file. These groups are equivalent operations:

perl -0777 -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g' filename

use File::Slurp qw( edit_file ) ;

edit_file { s/foo/bar/g } 'filename' ;

edit_file sub { s/foo/bar/g }, 'filename' ;

edit_file \&replace_foo, 'filename' ;

sub replace_foo { s/foo/bar/g }

edit_file_lines reads a whole file and puts each line into $_, calls its

code block argument and writes each $_ back out the file. These groups are

equivalent operations:

perl -pi -e '$_ = "" if /foo/' filename

use File::Slurp qw( edit_file_lines ) ;

edit_file_lines { $_ = '' if /foo/ } 'filename' ;

edit_file_lines sub { $_ = '' if /foo/ }, 'filename' ;

edit_file \&delete_foo, 'filename' ;

sub delete_foo { $_ = '' if /foo/ }

So now when someone asks for a simple way to modify a file from inside

Perl, you have an easy answer to give them.

