Perl one-liner to replace a code block

Question

I have a file foo.txt

hello world
      first line to change
        second line to change

I would like to write a perl one-liner that changes foo.txt to read

hello world
      this is
        my new text

I tried

perl -p -i -e 's/      first line to change\n        second line to change/      this is\n        my new text/g' foo.txt

but this script does nothing to the file. What's wrong with my one-liner?

cuonglm · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-24 05:18:59Z

2

By default, perl read one line input at a time, so your regex never matches. For working with multiple lines input, you have two options.

Enable paragraph mode:

perl -i.bak -00pe ...

or slurp the whole file:

perl -i.bak -0777pe ...

(Any value above -0400 will cause perl to slurp the whole file, -0777 is used for convention)

answered Aug 24, 2015 at 5:18

cuonglm

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