Regarding this: "I wish Perl would do an inplace edit of a file without creating a backup, though." $ perldoc perlrun (or http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.

Regarding this: "I wish Perl would do an inplace edit of a file without creating a backup, though." $ perldoc perlrun (or http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.html) says: > If no extension is supplied, and your system supports it, the original file is kept open without a name while the output is redirected to a new file with the original filename. When perl exits, cleanly or not, the original file is unlinked. Which system are you using? With macOS and Linux, I get no automatic .bak extension when not providing a backup suffix, i.e. it behaves like you want under these systems. Update: Apparently, anonymous files are not supported by Windows: http://stackoverflow.com/a/30539016 http://stackoverflow.com/a/30539016 which would explain the behaviour you describe.