Thanks for all your answers! I settled for the simplest of them all, by single quoting the shell variables:
> perl -wne 'if (/'$FILENAME'/) { s/\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}/'$UPDATED'/;print; > }' updated_files.txt The reason I use bash here and not only good old perl is that the bash script is much bigger and does other things as well. I wanted a simple 'sed' command but couldn't make it work so I used that command-line perl instead. Regards, Marcus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]