Question

This seems redundant, running perl from a Perl script itself.

my $Pref = "&*())(*&^%$#@!"; 
system("perl -pi -e 's|^SERVERNAME.*\$|SERVERNAME \"\Q$Pref\E\"|g' pserver.prefs");

What is the actual Perl code that will mimic -pi? I just want something that would work like sed on Perl, just as simple as can be.

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Based on Todd Gardner’s site, it seems it basically just reads and writes all of the file, attempting to apply the regex to every line. The solution was a bit complex for a noob Perl user like me, so I dumbed it down using:

my $ftp = "/home/shared/ftp";
my $backup = $ftp . ".bak";
rename($ftp, $backup);
open (FTP, "<", $backup) or die "Can't open $backup: $!"; 
open (FTP_OUT, ">", $ftp) or die "Can't open $ftp: $!"; 
    while (<FTP>)
    {
        $_ =~ s|$panel_user \Q$panel_oldpass\E |$panel_user \Q$panel_newpass\E |g;
        print FTP_OUT $_;
    }
close(FTP);
close(FTP_OUT);

Is there anything wrong with using two opens? Should this be avoided or is it ok for a simple solution?

I must admit, a system sed command is much more simple and cleaner.

Answer 1

I’d just use Tie::File.

use Tie::File;
use File::Copy;

copy $file, "$file.bak" or die "Failed to copy $file to $file.bak: $!";
tie @array, "Tie::File", $file or die "Can't open $file: $!";
s/foo/bar/ for @array;