Question

I’ve used this to update every file in a directory

perl -pi -e 's/include\s?\(/include_once(/g' *.php

It works fine but it seems to modify the access date of every *.php file in the directory – is there a way I can make it only modify the access of date of those files it’s actually modified ?

Answer 1

I’m assuming you mean modification time, not access time.

I do that by selecting which files to update:

egrep -l 'include\s?\(' *.php | xargs perl -pi -e ...