was defeated by Perl's ôòø-iôòù support (which, IIUC, says to take all script args as filenames, hence leaving no room for the script to check/handle args specially
Untried, but what comes to mind first is to check if ($ARGV eq "--help"). Or, omit the -i, check for --help/--version, and (if not present) then set $^I=1 before doing the rest. Or, avoid -i and code the file replacement by hand (see perlrun). On the other hand, I wouldn't argue that --help/--version support is so important for this script that it is worth any complication (let alone a wrapper). --best, karl.