run the perl script from a file? I know that sounds trite, but then you
don't have to worry about the command line interpretting your escape
characters literally - ideally if you can run it from the shell prompt,
you can run the shell commands from within a perl script as well.

On Tue, 16 Jan 2001, Austad, Jay wrote:

> Doesn't work.  I modified it because I'm calling it in a shell and some of
> the chars were being interpreted by the shell.  But it still doesn't work.
> Nothing gets replaced.  Any ideas?
> 
> 
> perl -pi -e "s/\(\\W\)/\\\$1/ge"
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Liz Burke-Scovill [mailto:kethry at winternet.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 1:13 PM
> > To: 'tclug-list at mn-linux.org'
> > Subject: Re: [TCLUG] perl regex question
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, 16 Jan 2001, Austad, Jay wrote:
> > 
> > > Ok, I have this shell script that pipes some stuff to 
> > xargs.  Some of the
> > > stuff has lone single quotes in it and breaks the pipe to 
> > xargs because of
> > > an unmatched quote error.  So to fix this, I do something like:
> > > 
> > > cat filname.txt | perl -pi -e "s/\'/\\\'/g" | xargs ....
> > 
> > perl -pi -e "s/(\W)/\\$1/g" should do the trick - \W looks for all non
> > alphanumeric characters - putting it in parenthesis turns it into a
> > segment for backreferencing, $1 is the backreference variable
> > 
> >  > 
> > > How can I modify that perl statement so it will take single 
> > quotes, double
> > > quotes, greater/less than signs, question marks, and 
> > asterisks, and replace
> > > them with a backslash and then themselves?
> > > 
> > > * would be \*
> > > ? would be \?
> > > " would be \"
> > > and so on.
> > > 
> > > I don't want to have a bunch of -e statements in my little 
> > perl command.
> > > 
> > > Jay
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > tclug-list mailing list
> > > tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> > > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
> > > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > Imagination is intelligence having fun...
> > e-mail:  kethry at winternet.com
> > URL:  http://WWW.winternet.com/~kethry/index.html
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > tclug-list mailing list
> > tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
> > 
> _______________________________________________
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> 

-- 
Imagination is intelligence having fun...
e-mail:  kethry at winternet.com
URL:  http://WWW.winternet.com/~kethry/index.html