Question

I got a LDAP schema but ldifde wraps long lines so after googled I found this command to fix the file, but I’m getting the following error:

c:\Perl64\bin>perl -p -e 'BEGIN {$/ = undef}    s/\n(?=[a-z])/ /g' test.ldf
Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 1.

c:\Perl64\bin>

Even replacing the content with a single line I get the same error so I assume the sentence is wrong.

Could you give some clue about that, Im newbie on perl.

Thanks,
m0dest0.

Answer 1

You seem to be on windows. Windows does not recognize single quote ', you need to use double quote ":

c:\Perl64\bin>perl -pe "BEGIN {$/ = undef} s/\n(?=[a-z])/ /g" test.ldf

You should be aware that this does not change the input file, it just prints to standard output. If you want to alter the file, you can either add the in-place edit switch, e.g. -i.bak (saves backup in test.ldf.bak) or use redirection:

c:\Perl64\bin>perl -pe "BEGIN {$/ = undef} s/\n(?=[a-z])/ /g" test.ldf > out.ldf