perl -pi.bak -e equivalent

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Caj Zell wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I am looking a little bit at python and am curious of one thing I
> often use in perl. Suppose, I want to change the string
> "best_composer" to "Zappa" in a document called facts.txt, then in
> perl I would do
> 
> perl -pi.bak  -e "s/best_composer/Zappa/;" facts.txt
> 
> Can I do that with python from the command line so easily?

Short answer: No. Perl is designed for this kind of stuff. Python won't
catch up in that field, for various reasons. There have been plenty of
discussions on the subject of one-liners in python - googl.groups will show
you to them. 

As always, its important to use the right tool for the job - and in this
case, I'd even go for sed :)

sed s/best_composer/Zappa/ < facts.txt > pi.bak

is even shorter...

-- 
Regards,

Diez B. Roggisch