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Asked: 2026-05-26T13:24:27+00:00

This works: perl -pi -e ‘s/abc/cba/g’ hellofile But this does not: perl -pie ‘s/cba/abc/g’

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This works:

perl -pi -e 's/abc/cba/g' hellofile

But this does not:

perl -pie 's/cba/abc/g' hellofile

In other words -pi -e works but -pie does not. Why?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The -i flag takes an optional argument (which, if present, must be immediately after it, not in a separate command-line argument) that specifies the suffix to append to the name of the input file for the purposes of creating a backup. Writing perl -pie 's/cba/abc/g' hellofile causes the e to be taken as this suffix, and as the e isn’t interpreted as the normal -e option, Perl tries to run the script located in s/cba/abc/g, which probably doesn’t exist.

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