On 03/16/2011 01:42 PM, Joseph L. Casale wrote: >>> $conf['nagios_base'] = >> I'd just search for that part, above. > Me to, and I never even got to the replacement as the search for that > was bailing:) The problem is trying to pass valid Perl though the bash shell . There is an insane amount of interaction between all the escapings involved in this specific pattern. The hard problem is getting bash to *not* change what you are passing to Perl before Perl sees it. Use 'echo' as a stand-in for Perl and you will see what is actually being passed to Perl for execution (it most likely isn't what you think it is). Once you know you are feeding Perl the right thing, you can worry about getting the pattern for the substitution correct. After enough poking and prodding you'll get something like this (after giving up on getting bash to not molest the ' characters before passing them to Perl): 's/(\$conf\[\047nagios_base\047]\s*=\s*")\/nagios\/cgi-bin";/$1stuffhere"\;/' Is there some reason you can't use a straight Perl script instead of using bash to run a perl one liner? -- Benjamin Franz