[Pdx-pm] command line options

[Bruce J Keeler]

On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 14:01, Thomas J Keller wrote:
> Hi all,
> Simple question, but I can't find the answer.
> I want to do the simplest thing: read a tab delimited file with Mac 
> ('\cM' carriage return) endings, and remove extra whitespace.
> 
> I wrote this on the command line:
> perl -i.bak -pe 'local $/ = "\cM';  s/[\s\t]+/\t/g;' input.txt

This is equivalent to:

        while (<>) {
        	local $/ = "\cM";
        	s/[\s\t]+/\t/g;
        	print;
        }

The 'local $/ = "\cM"' statement is in the wrong place to influence the
behavior of the '<>', so the whole file is being read in at once, and
the regex only runs once.  That's problem #1.

Problem #2 is that \s matches the carriage-returns, so they're getting
eaten and replaced with tabs.

Bruce