perl substitution question

[Gary Kline]

On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 10:31:04PM +0200, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> On 2007-01-14 12:15, Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> wrote:
> > Thanks for all the ways, gents.  (I never thought of tr, but now that
> > seems like an option.)  A week+ ago I tried perl using 's/\xNN/"/g'
> > from the cmdline, but nojoy.  The online docs said that \N{xx} would
> > catch a hex character; that's what was fuzzy.
> 
> Watch out for shells with funny 'expansion rules', like csh(1) :)
> 
> Even in sh(1) variants, it's always a good idea to save the Perl script
> in a file first, and test it independently of the shell, with:
> 
> 	perl filter.pl < infile > outfile
> 
> To avoid all the messy details about single-quotes, double-quotes,
> backquotes, stars, dollars, etc :)
> 

	Man!  truer words, (&c)... .  One o the very few suggestions 
	left for improving shells [ and/or subshells ] is a flag, 
	say '-N' which would have *nothing* to be escaped.  In other 
	words a '$' or '"' would be interpreted literally.    But I'm
	sure there are reasons for not escaping some bytes.   

-- 
  Gary Kline  kline at thought.org   www.thought.org  Public Service Unix