Weaver, Walt wrote: > Okay, so I do a "perl -pi -e 's/$/;/g' <filename>" to try and append a > semicolon to the end of each record in a file in Linux. > > It does that just fine. Unfortunately it also prepends a semicolon > onto the beginning of each record too.
Well, not exactly. Note that there's no semicolon in front of the first line. You need to leave the "g" off. When you use /g, you're saying to repeat the substitution multiple times for each line. You only want one match for each line. What's happening is that perl lets $ match at the end of the line, or just before a trailing newline character. When you use /g, it ends up matching twice: once before the trailing newline and once at the very end of the string. So if the first line in the file is "foo", you wind up with: foo;\n <-- first replacement foo;\n; <-- second replacement The second semicolon will display at the front of the next line. Note that you can also achieve this by using the -l (ell) option. In this case perl strips the line terminator off before doing the substition and adds it back on before printing the line. Then /g can only find one match. But the problem is /g; just leave it off. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
