It is the -p that does it (as John said). -i makes a backup, -e says what follows is code. You can do it in one line, it would just have to be a long line. :-) The 'sed' instructions look easier to me... >>> crumley at belka.space.umn.edu 03/25/02 02:16PM >>> On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 01:19:36PM -0600, Jared Burns wrote: I don't think you can do multi-line regexps with a one-liner call of perl. The one-liner way of calling perl reads in your file line by line and acts on it, so its not able to match multi-line regexps. Look at the perlrun man page (and in particular the -e and -i options). So I think you'll have to turn this into a simple perl script to get it work or use sed.