Perl diamond operator (<>) doesn't handle file name pattern?

Question

Seems <> operator cannot handle file name patterns, like file*.txt. Is there any solution for such need? For example, replace a pattern in files in some name pattern (perl -i.bak -pe s/p1/p2/g file*.txt). I am using Windows and cmd.exe also doesn't expand the file name pattern.

Answer 1

Based on answer from @choroba, I think using BEGING block to translate the wildchars also works well.

perl -i.bak -pe"BEGIN{@ARGV=glob shift}s/p1/p2/g" file*.txt

or below works for multiple input patterns:

perl -i.bak -pe"BEGIN{@ARGV=map glob,@ARGV}s/p1/p2/g" file*.txt

Answer 2

The glob operator is used to expand wildcards in file names; see perldoc -f glob. However, the built-in one considers whitespace as separators, meaning it won't handle spaces in file names correctly. Replace it with the :bsd_glob from File::Glob. File::Glob is a standard module and comes installed with Perl. For a list for standard modules, see perldoc perlmodlib.

use File::Glob qw( :bsd_glob );
@ARGV = map { glob } @ARGV;

This is how you can incorporate it in your one-liner:

perl -i.bak -MFile::Glob=:bsd_glob -pe"BEGIN { @ARGV = map glob, @ARGV } s/p1/p2/g" *.txt

Answer 3

In *nix, the shell is responsible for expanding wildcards in paths. In MSWin, it's upon the application to do it.

perl -i~ -we "@ARGV = glob shift; s/p1/p2/g, print while <>" file*.txt