On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 01:19:36PM -0600, Jared Burns wrote:
> I've got a file containing the text:
> blah
> grah
>
> and I want to replace those two lines with the string:
> broohaha
>
> I've tried using:
> perl -pi -e 's/blah\ngrah/broohaha/' file
>
> I've also tried:
> perl -pi -e 's/blah\ngrah/broohaha/s' file
> perl -pi -e 's/blah\ngrah/broohaha/m' file
> perl -pi -e 's/blah\ngrah/broohaha/ms' file
>
> all with no success. What am I doing wrong? How do I replace a string that
> spans multiple lines?
>
I may be wrong, but since -p does a 'while (<>) {...}' around
your -e code, the angle operator "<>" is readline()-ing
newline-terminated lines from the file, so /\n.+/ will never
match.
How about
perl -pi -e 'BEGIN{undef $/} s/blah\ngrah\n/broohaha/' file
or such? Could be a real dog on a big file though.
--
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