Hi! It seems there is a bug on the "-i" switch for perl. I do not know if it's a perl issue or cygwin issue so I post it here for first; let me know please if it would be better to send a bug report to perl mainteners instead.
Here is a small example: ############################################################################### gcm [0][GEN13]~>mkdir tmp gcm [0][GEN13]~>cd tmp /home/benoitr/tmp gcm [0][GEN13]~/tmp>echo hello > hello gcm [0][GEN13]~/tmp>ls -al total 5 drwxr-xr-x 2 benoitr None 0 Feb 6 11:35 ./ drwxr-xr-x 5 benoitr None 4096 Feb 6 11:34 ../ -rw-r--r-- 1 benoitr None 6 Feb 6 11:35 hello gcm [0][GEN13]~/tmp>perl -p -i -e 1 hello Can't do inplace edit on hello: Permission denied. gcm [0][GEN13]~/tmp>ls -al total 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 benoitr None 0 Feb 6 11:35 ./ drwxr-xr-x 5 benoitr None 4096 Feb 6 11:34 ../ gcm [0][GEN13]~/tmp>echo hello > hello gcm [0][GEN13]~/tmp>perl -p -i~ -e 1 hello gcm [0][GEN13]~/tmp>ls -al total 6 drwxr-xr-x 2 benoitr None 0 Feb 6 11:35 ./ drwxr-xr-x 5 benoitr None 4096 Feb 6 11:34 ../ -rw-r--r-- 1 benoitr None 6 Feb 6 11:35 hello -rw-r--r-- 1 benoitr None 6 Feb 6 11:35 hello~ ############################################################################### As you can see, the "-i" switch works well with an argument but not at all with no arguments, which is really inconvenient for me since I have a bunch of scripts written on UNIX system that rely on this capability (for substituting texts inplace on a collection of files in conjunction with find and xargs for example). I remember that I had this problem one year ago (on cygwin with a modified version of perl since perl was not on the cygwin standard package at this time) and fixes it by using the arg form of the -i switch, followed by a rm of the moved file. The "man perlrun" page well describe the desired behavior of the "-i" switch with an argument (in fact, the code that "should" be executed) but not at all the "no arg" form of the "-i" switch. I suppose it should only "unlink" the moved file (but is this the way it is done; i.e. moving the original file with a name not already used in the same directory?). Oh! Please don't send a workaround, just tell me if it's really a bug or my misunderstanding of something and what should I do exactly to forward my observations so that perl/cygwin can be corrected accordingly to the doc. As a sugar, if the "-i" switch doc in the man page could exactly describe the behavior when no arg is given, that would be for sure an enhancement. Ben -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
