Question

In my bash_profile I have this:

  function ht() { perl -i -pe 's|<!-- Mirrored from (.*?) -->\n||' "$a" ;}

I want to run ht to do an inline replacement on the file fed to remove an HTML Comment with the HTTrack signature, but when I run this,

ht file.html

I get:

Can't open : No such file or directory.

I suspect this is because of the quotes around my $a which interfere with the perl command being fed. Perhaps it prefixes the " literally to the filename, or something of this nature and overall it becomes the wrong filename.

I tried removing the double quotes around my $a but that doesn’t seem to do what I want. How can I resolve this?

Answer 1

You have to tell perl what file you’re trying to run with. Change to this:

function ht() { perl -i -pe 's|<!-- Mirrored from (.*?) -->\n||' "$@";}

Note the $@ instead of “$a” at the end. As @jwd points out, that’s even better than $* in most cases.